再谢古纸兄的文化渗透。因为不明确我“读出”的调侃“贵族”就是 Fellowes 的初衷，也去维基查了----

一下。提到“The Rules of the Game”。我估计，那个“原创”，有许多“借鉴”（山寨）在其中。因为跨语种跨时代（70年），而且不是“抄旅游书”那种劣质二才的问题，奥斯卡评委们也就认可了，*_*。这有一个 Fellowes 同学获奖后纽时记者采访他的报导（忽然发现是22年旧的考古文，^_^）。贴在下面，古纸兄读着玩。节日温馨，暖和着。

'Gosford' Writer Is Unfazed by Class but Amazed by Fame

By Warren Hoge

April 15, 2002

A basement den with ancestral portraits and antiques on a tree-lined London street of red brick Victorian town houses is an unlikely launching pad for a leap directly onto the stage of the Academy Awards. But it turns out to have been precisely the right embarkation spot for Julian Fellowes, whose script for ''Gosford Park'' won the Oscar for best original screenplay.

Mr. Fellowes, 52, a character actor and prizewinning television writer, had never had a feature film produced before. He would probably not have been the director Robert Altman's choice for ''Gosford Park'' had he not spent his life surrounded by such refinement.

''The number of screenwriters who understand the duties of a 1930's English country house still-room maid is a comparatively short list,'' Mr. Fellowes said.

He learned firsthand about the upstairs-downstairs world that is the film's centerpiece. He is the product of a landed dynasty of military officers, doctors and diplomats, and he is married to Emma Kitchener, lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent and a direct descendant of the Lord Kitchener staring out from the famous wartime poster telling Britons their country needed them.

Mr. Fellowes charted an unusual path for a young man of his pedigree. He went to drama school in London after graduation from Cambridge, took secondary roles in a number of West End plays and, in the early 1980's, some Hollywood movies before returning here to perform onstage and in television and to write mini-series adaptations of classics like Mark Twain's ''Prince and the Pauper'' and Frances Hodgson Burnett's ''Little Lord Fauntleroy.''

When Gwyneth Paltrow read out his name last month as an Academy Award winner, he was properly surprised and impressed but a little taken aback at the tinseltown dramatization of his late-life good fortune. ''One story written about me in Hollywood made me sound like some sort of Ray Milland figure, you know, sagging against the railings of life, clutching at some kind of existence,'' he said. ''That wasn't the case at all. I had a perfectly respectable acting and writing career.''

His Schwab's Drugstore discovery, as he called it in his acceptance remarks, was a conference call to him in London from his actor-producer friend Bob Balaban in New York and Mr. Altman in Dallas.

The brief for ''Gosford Park'' was a vague one. ''The idea was to write a film set in a country house in the 30's and to have a murder in there somewhere, but for it to really be an examination of class,'' Mr. Fellowes said. ''You know, when it says, 'based on an idea,' that was it.''

The first call also marked his first moment in his parallel role of etiquette counselor. ''They said they wanted the film to be about three groups, the family, the guests and the servants, and I of course said, 'No, there are four groups because you also have the visiting servants.' ''

He was on the set for every shot, a welcome not generally extended to screenwriters, and he said there were hundreds of moments when he intervened on matters like how tables were properly set and how a newspaper should be pressed with an iron to dry the ink.

''I told Bob, 'My job is to make sure you don't make a mistake by accident,' '' he said. '' 'If you want to make one on purpose, that's your choice.' There are a couple of scenes, for instance, where you see a footman coming up the main staircase. It would have never happened. But in the end, you're making a film, not a documentary archive, and Bob had this strong sense that the film ought to be accurate, or otherwise the satire and humor wouldn't work as well, that the film would lose its way.''

Mr. Fellowes said that consequently there was very little of the improvisation that people associate with Altman films: ''The English class system is incredibly complicated, and the screenplay was written in very class-specific language and phraseology used by this very arcane group of people. Very few actors can extrapolate from that without having it sound instantly modern or bourgeois, and the rules were that they came on the set and said the scripted lines and then if it was over and the camera was still going, they could then sort of bang on. But little of that survived into the final edit.''

The aristocratic background that helped Mr. Fellowes land his Oscar-winning assignment was once a barrier to his acting career. Directors of the politicized London stage of the 1970's found him suitable only for roles as starchy army officers, vicars, valets, blimps and upper-class twits.

''I couldn't even get an audition at the Royal Shakespeare,'' he said. ''And a casting director at the National who rather wanted to use me in a Restoration comedy they were doing took me aside and said, 'We've discussed you, and we've decided that actually your type of actor would be happier on the other side of the river' -- meaning the West End drawing room comedies.''

In Hollywood, where he went in 1981, his upper-class bearing also limited his appeal. ''I first played a sort of toff manager of a hotel in Pasadena,'' he said. ''Then I got parts where I was mysterious and wise all the time; you know, how you're supposed to be if you're foreign. I went from being chubby and dear to being sort of slanty-eyed and rather nasty, and suddenly this whole new career of smoothy Nazis opened up.'' He returned to London.

He confesses that he often thinks class is a hideous practical joke. ''For instance, the bathroom thing,'' he said. ''There are people with comfortable bathrooms off their bedrooms, with carpets and things, and we always considered them rather middle class. Old country houses tend to have one bathroom for every 53 bedrooms, and people always thought it nobbier to walk miles for hours down freezing corridors and queue up in order to get into a rusty old bath with one tap that spit out cold water the color of brown Windsor soup.''

He caught what he calls the ''dying fall'' of the traditional season, and pretense was already visible. ''You would get a letter saying, 'Mrs. Snookes tells me you are coming to the dance she is giving for her daughter Lucinda, and we should be so pleased if you would arrive at 6 p.m.' Then you'd look at the top of the invitation and it would say, you know, 'Normby Towers' or something grand, and you'd think, 'I'll have to pack my case incredibly carefully and be frightfully clean and neat.'

''And then you'd arrive, and you'd discover that the main house had burnt down in 1931, and the family was all living above the stable.''

His decision to pursue theater at first set him apart from his childhood friends. ''They thought I was completely mad, but one of the changes that happened in my adult life was the vanishing of the idea of safe careers,'' he said. ''Nowadays, if you say, 'My son is in television,' people no longer grip the chair with white knuckles.''

His own father hoped Julian might follow him into the foreign service, but he raised little objection to his son's decision. ''My father said, 'If you have the misfortune to be born into a generation which must earn its living, you might as well do something amusing.' ''

So has the award changed his life? ''Well funny enough,'' he said, ''all these old scripts of mine are suddenly coming to life like Christopher Lee's wives rising from the tomb, acquiring flesh upon their bones. And that's thanks to Mr. Oscar.'' He is writing a film for Warner Brothers and adapting a book for Universal while continuing on with his role as a lord in a BBC television series, ''Monarch of the Glen.''

He pointed out how fast everything had happened for him. ''From the beginning of December, when I was this middlingly successful actor who'd written this film that got made, and the end of March, when I am this Oscar winner with contracts with two Hollywood studios, I have only had 12 weeks to adjust to this change. If it were a pregnancy, I'd be only a third of the way there.''

He said winning the award had left him with an overriding wish. ''I got a telephone call at age 50, and at 52 I'm off to the Oscars, and I hope that gives heart to all those people who think they've missed it,'' he said. ''They haven't necessarily, and God knows I thought I had missed it 15 years ago. I think there's something cheering in seeing a late starter. I'm kind of the Margaret Rutherford of screenwriting, and I hope people find that encouraging. I want them to.''

A correction was made on 

April 20, 2002

An article in Arts & Ideas last Saturday about Julian Fellowes, whose screenplay of ''Gosford Park'' won an Oscar this year, misstated the relationship of his wife, Emma Kitchener, to Lord Kitchener, subject of a famous British recruitment poster in World War I. She is a great-grandniece, not a direct descendant.