FOR A BALDING 55-year-old with a paunch and a metal spine, Julian Fellowes is a disgustingly happy fellow. The self-styled King of Class, he's the overnight darling of Hollywood. If you want to know how to hold a teacup or why it's irredeemably vulgar to say 'mantlepiece' - apparently one should say 'mantleshelf' - he's your man. Americans just adore him.
And they're not alone. Gosford Park won him an Oscar, his novel Snobs, newly released in paperback, is a best-seller and his long-legged wife, Emma, is lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent.
He is truly a toff's toff. A great big Bentley of a man, his vowels are as immaculate as his fingernails. Encased in blue blazer and green corduroy he looks entirely at home amid the heavy family oils that litter the walls. No less than three rivers run through his sprawling estate.
But it wasn't always so. When he wrote that screenplay, he was 52, staying in a boarding house in Inverness, Scotland, ekeing out a career acting in light television, notably the buffoonish Lord Kilwillie in BBC's gently amusing Monarch of the Glen.
Since then he's worked relentlessly. He rewrote the screenplay for Vanity Fair, and wrote the stage adaptation of the hugely successful musical Mary Poppins, and his latest film Separate Lives - which he wrote and directed - is being released this summer. There is, it seems, no stopping him.
'If I'd been born 15 years earlier, success would have come sooner, I think. For the generation before me, it was an advantage to be posh. For my generation it was a disadvantage. But now it's neither and I do think that's best.