Carnival Films and ITV announced Monday that the actress Shirley MacLaine will join the series for its third season. In addition she will be the second American in the British drama series.
Shirley MacLaine will play Martha Levinson, the American mother of Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) and will join the cast as they begin shooting the new season which is scheduled to do so early next month as did the two first few seasons.
For the third season seems all in the family, the executive producer Gareth Neame has told the media: "My grandfather went to Shirley MacLaine in Gambit in 1966. It is a pleasure for me to join the cast of Downton Abbey". With this motivation should make a third season even better than the previous two that have already been a success.
The third season, which apparently will focus on the mid-20's, about 18 months total time in which Crawley, the Grantham and his servants will live the consequences of the war. Is expected to be released in the UK from September.
"Downton Abbey" is in its second season in the U.S. in Masterpiece Classic. The last episode was a British audience of 20 percent while in the U.S. increased by nearly 30 percent with a premiere of 4.2 million viewers.
In early January, Downton Abbey won the Golden Globe for best television series.
It is not known even if the third season will be the last because the creator had told British media that he saw that "Downton Abbey" spend a third season, he did not want to start using special aging makeup to actors due to the large over the years in the series.
This is a lovely lush series with production values more like Brideshead than Upstairs, and is thoroughly enjoyable. It seems more accurately to be a 20's and 30's era drama in its characters, other than the dowager countess, who have the buffer look and attitudes of the 20's rather than the historically accurate depiction of the Edwardian age. The servants of this Earl seem unrealistically to have very personal relationships with the family. I do believe that the relationship was much more formal and distant, like most employee-employer relationships today. However it is a lovely series with a performance by Maggie Smith as much a jewel as Gielgud's in Brideshead. It would be good if PBS made a short film exploring the actual servant-master relationship during the Edwardian period as a companion piece, but this might be a hard sell. But, regardless, Hoorah for PBS.
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