Maid in Yorkshire... meet the freshest face at Downton

It’s her first professional job – in world record-breaking television series Downton Abbey.

Cara Theobold didn’t even have time to draw breath between leaving the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and going to audition for the role of the lowly kitchenmaid Ivy Stuart in the ITV series that is now screened by more than 220 countries around the globe.

The Crawley family mansion, as any viewer knows, is a splendid pile set somewhere between Thirsk and Ripon in North Yorkshire. That’s the fiction. The fact is that the series is shot on location at Highclere Castle in Hampshire (exteriors and magnificent interiors) and in the studio at Ealing, where all the kitchen scenes are filmed.

“It may supposed to be ‘Yorkshire’ for all my colleagues who film in the house and grounds,” laughs Cara, “but for me, it’s always west London. I never get scenes anywhere else. The strange thing is that it does all look so realistic. You forget the cameras, and there I am, transported back almost a century ago, and I already feel part of the surroundings. When there is an opportunity for me to look through the basement windows, I see this lovely landscape and bright sunshine, and then I have to pinch myself that it is all fake, painted cloths and brilliant lighting effects. It is all very effective and convincing.”

Cara’s family still live in Wakefield, where she grew up, and are huge fans of the series.

“I actually joined the Downton team last year,” she explains. “I was in a few episodes in the run-up to Christmas, and the big finale – the death of the heir to Downton and the Earldom of Grantham, Matthew Crawley. And, like everyone else, I was sworn to total secrecy.

“Come Christmas Day, we all sat down and watched it together, sitting by the fire after dinner, and I was thinking to myself ‘My mum is not going to like this at all…’ And I was right – she got all emotional when the car crash came. And then everyone else was on at me, saying ‘How couldn’t you have warned us?’ I think that there were a lot of people in Britain who went into a bit of shock that evening.”

Filming is still going on as the first episodes screen in the fourth series, and there’s this year’s Christmas special still to get in the bag.

“Please don’t even ask,” she smiles, “you’re not going to get a word out of me. It’s been a great experience for me in the last few months, because last year I was as nervous as a kitten. I’d never been on a film set before. I’d worked a lot on stage at college, but that was it. And, I suppose, I could relate a lot to Ivy, because she was in a strange new environment as well. She had to find her place in the pecking order. It was the same with me – there I was, with a lot of very experienced and talented actors, and, believe me, I think I’ve spent more time watching them and observing how they work, and learning so much from that, than I’ve spent time learning and saying my lines.”

Cara went to Outwood Grange School in Wakefield before heading south to train, and, comparing Ivy’s life with her own, Cara says: “It’s really odd for me, living as a 22-year-old modern, I hope, independent woman, to inhabit the body and mind of a person who, in 1922, just didn’t have opportunities and possibilities.

“I am so very lucky to be working in a job that I adore. Ivy does what she does because she has no choice at all.”

There may, says Cara, “be a little bit of love interest” for her, but you’ll have to wait and see. There’s a bit of a ‘love quadrangle’ going on. Daisy likes Alfred the footman, Alfred likes Ivy, and Ivy quite fancies the new footman Jimmy (played by Ed Speleers) and Jimmy might actually like her.

At any rate, he takes her to the pub and theatre, where Cara gets to swap her usual pinny for a brown jacket, with matching brown dress and shoes.

“OK, I admit it, I do get deeply envious of some of the other girls in the cast who get to wear some stunning frocks and gowns, and who look so beautiful in them – I am a huge fan of the fashions and styles of the early Twenties, which were so elegant and beautifully designed. And I love the music of the era as well, which seemed to reflect that it was a time of change, and broadening opportunities.

“But for Ivy, well, it was a pretty grim time for anyone in service. It must have been a living hell, up at the beck and call of the master and his wife until all hours, and then up before dawn to get all the menial tasks out of the way. And all for a pittance. What fun was there to be had in any of that?”

Downton Abbey begins on ITV this Sunday at 9pm.