Housemaid Anna helps to prepare Downton for war

JOANNE Froggatt says that playing the thoroughly kind, sweet and decent housemaid Anna in Downton Abbey was a “refreshing change” from the traumatised characters she has tended to play during her career so far.

They have included roles in Spooks, Rebus, Life on Mars and Joanne Lees in Death in the Outback – not to mention tearaway teenager Zoe Tattersall in Coronation Street.

Naturally no young actress says no when a script by Julian Fellowes – the man behind such film hits as Gosford Park and The Young Victoria – is waved under her nose and involves a stellar cast, a good budget and beautiful locations.

The chance to play a pivotal character linking the Edwardian aristocrats upstairs to the team of servants below stairs who keep the whole show on the road presented her with something completely new.

“I’d played a lot of dark personalities, portraying all the difficulties of overcoming adversities with so many other roles,” says the 30-year-old, who hails from the village of Littlebeck near Whitby.

“They were all very diverse and fascinating, but for once doing someone who is positive in her outlook and is always sticking up for others as well as herself was as much of a challenge, but in a different way.”

Downton Abbey wowed both audiences and critics with its opening series of seven episodes last year, drawing comment for its impeccable ensemble acting, the wit and intelligence of the writing and the beauty and elegance of its locations, principally Highclere Castle Estate in Berkshire.

Its climax attracted a peak of 11.4 million viewers. The cast of the series, which was set in 1912 and followed the fortunes of the wealthy family and their servants in the run-up to the First World War, is led by Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern and Dame Maggie Smith.

While a second series of eight episodes and a Christmas Special are still in the throes of a five-month production period, 18 of the cast plus producers will climb aboard the charabanc for the Philips Bafta TV Awards this weekend, hoping the series will win in at least one of the three gongs for which it has been nominated – including the YouTube Audience Award.

As if spending up to 12 hours a day in a corset while playing Anna were not enough, Froggatt says her frock for the awards also has a corset bodice built into it.

“It’s not comfortable spending all that time wearing the corset during the shoot, but it gives us all the right straight-backed look of the period. As part of my preparation for Anna, who is a senior housemaid and personal maid to the young ladies of the house, I read books like Keeping Their Place – personal stories, letters and diary entries of Edwardian employers and their servants.

“We also had etiquette lessons, to teach us about serving at table, who would sit where in the servants’ hall, how servants should speak to employers, and the much more precise manner of speech that was used back then.”

The first series of Downton ended with the announcement of war, and series two will take up the story as both masters and servants begin to feel the effects of the conflict and Downton Abbey becomes a hospital for casualties of the trenches.

Anna the housemaid is not Froggatt’s first outing in period costume. Her CV includes outings in Lorna Doone and Robin Hood, as well as parts in dramas set in the 1940s and 60s. From the age of about 11, Joanne says she dreamed of performing on stage, and she was a member of a young group of performers called The Rounders, based at Alan Ayckbourn’s Theatre in the Round in Scarborough.

She managed to get into a drama school in Berkshire at 13, and at 15 was appearing in The Bill.

During a professional hiatus when she was 16 and working at WH Smith, her agent called to say Granada wanted her to audition for Coronation Street. She got there to discover there had been a mistake and the casting director actually wanted a mixed race girl.

“I was disappointed, but I had a tape with me of work I’d done on The Bill, and that got me another role, the part of Zoe, which was meant to be four episodes’ work. It developed into an 18-month stay, during which time Zoe caused all sorts of mayhem, had a baby, gave the baby away, stole the baby back and eventually ran away to a religious cult. Corrie was my real drama school, I suppose.”

All talk of forthcoming plotlines in Downton Abbey is forbidden for now. All Joanne can say is: “The stories are really exciting, as each of the characters is caught up in a crucial moment in history.”

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The Philips BAFTA TV Awards are on BBC1 this Sunday at 8pm.