DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERAPG, 125 minutes, in cinemas April 28

In Downton Abbeys first excursion on the big screen in 2019, the upstairs and downstairs families battled the implacable forces of the Buckingham Palace bureaucracy in the lead-up to a visit from King George V and Queen Mary.

This time, they face an equally powerful but much more modern institution with an aristocracy all its own the moving pictures.

All the familiar faces have turned up for the occasion.Credit:Ben Blackall

A film is to be shot at Downton, a prospect that fills Hugh Bonnevilles Lord Grantham with revulsion. The place will be overrun, he snorts, by actresses plastered in make-up and actors just plastered.

Then, just in time, a diversion presents itself. His mother, Maggie Smiths Lady Violet Crawley, receives the news shes been gifted a villa in the south of France. Why? This question is a cue for Downtons creator, Julian Fellowes, to introduce one of his most reliable plot devices, the long-buried family secret. A Crawley party sets out for the Riviera to find out more, leaving Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to watch over the film-making.

The mere fact Violet has fronted up for the sequel verges on a minor miracle. At the end of the last film, she was dealing with the revelation she probably had just a few months to live news that would surely have pleased Maggie Smith herself. When the series finished in 2015, she told chat show host Graham Norton that she was glad that it was over, partly because Violet had to be about 110 by then and her continued good health didnt make a lot of sense. Even on Downtons rarefied plane of existence, immortality isnt yet in the offing.

Penelope Wilton stars as Isobel Merton and Maggie Smith as Violet Grantham.Credit:Ben Blackall

But here she is, saddling up again, ready to fire off a new quiver full of Violets characteristic zingers with all her old elan. Just before the film crew is due to arrive, she gives Mary a sage piece of advice. Women like us, she says, fall into two categories dragons and fools. You must make sure they think of you as a dragon.

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Downton 2 is the perfect escapists paradise - Sydney Morning Herald