Downton Abbey: first pictures of Lady Rose's "fairy-tale" wedding dress
Sunday's Downton Abbey series finale will see the Crawleys organising a "fairy-tale" wedding as Lady Rose and Atticus Aldridge, who became engaged at the end of episode seven, prepare to walk down the aisle.
Finding the all-important dress that she will do it in was the job of Downton's costume designer Anna Mary Scott Robbins, who calls sourcing Rose's outfit "the high point of my career."
"Lady Rose would have had her wedding dress made especially for her big day, so I was anticipating having to make something from scratch. As it happened, we had the biggest stroke of luck," she says in this week's Radio Times magazine.
"The dress she wears is a completely original piece that we unearthed in a vintage shop in immaculate condition. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when we found it and when Lily James put it on, it was one of those perfect moments you don't get that often in your career."
Rose's wedding dress is markedly different from the dresses worn by her cousins Lady Mary and Lady Edith on their ill-fated wedding days. Her beaded gown and headdress reflects the change in time, as well as Rose's "feminine, pretty and frivolous" style.
Take a look at Lady Rose's "fairy-tale" wedding dress in all its glory:
Read the full article and see more images in this week's Radio Times magazine
Downton Abbey concludes on Sunday at 9:00pm on ITV
BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Downton’s Lady Rose gets her fairytale ending
Lily James, who plays fun-loving Lady Rose in Downton Abbey, is leaving the phenomenally popular show after she completes filming series five — but she won’t be killed off.
The actress is the title star of Disney’s live-action, big-screen Cinderella, which also stars Game Of Thrones actor Richard Madden (Robb Stark, the King Of The North) as Prince Charming, Cate Blanchett as Cinderella’s stepmother, and Helena Bonham Carter as the fairy godmother.
Disney will release the picture next year, around Easter, and they have requested that Lily make herself available to help market the movie around the world.
Lily James, who plays fun-loving Lady Rose in Downton Abbey, is leaving the phenomenally popular show after she completes filming series five
She would be beginning her duties as a Disney Princess around the same time as Downton Abbey starts filming its sixth season.
The Downton overlords don’t want Lady Rose written out of the show, though, so they will have her ‘bubbling’ away, but out of sight, and have urged her to come back and appear in the special Christmas episodes.
Downton creator and writer Julian Fellowes likes the energy Lily brings to the role of Lady Rose and doesn’t want her bumped off the way Matthew Crawley was, when Dan Stevens didn’t renew his contract; and Lady Sybil succumbed when Jessica Brown Findlay decided to quit Downton. (Both Stevens and Findlay wanted to be written out of the story.)
Lily James as Lady Rose MacClare in Downton Abbey
‘Lily’s young and adds balance to the family upstairs,’ a production executive told me.
It’s clear Lily enjoys working on Downton, too. Each time I saw her on the Cinderella set she told me she was eager to see her Downton ‘family’.
It hasn’t been settled yet exactly how Lady Rose’s absence will be explained. The next Downton series will be seen in the autumn.
The Cinderella film is a big deal. It’s directed by Kenneth Branagh and features sumptuous sets created by Dante Ferretti. The ballroom scene took up the entire 007 sound stage at Pinewood
Studios; there were 500 extras dancing about; and Sandy Powell, the three-time Oscar winning designer, made the dazzling costumes.
‘It’s a very important film for Disney, and you can understand them wanting their leading lady to be available to promote it,’ one of Lily’s team told me.
