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'Downton Abbey' adds Harriet Walter, Kiri Te Kanawa in guest role; Shirley MacLaine returns
Photo credit: Carnival Films
Shirley MacLaine will return to 'Downton Abbey' in next season's finale while renowned stage actress Harriet Walter and opera star Kiri Te Kanawa are joining in guest roles, the show announced yesterday. Joanne David, another big English TV star, is also joining in a guest role.
Walter's especially intriguing because she's an esteemed Shakespearean actor, and well-known on British TV, now about to get some exposure to U.S. audiences. (She's also been on Broadway, recently in "Mary Stuart.") New Zealand born Te Kanewa is an opera great - a household name to opera buffs for decades (her role's expected to be brief, more along the lines of a cameo, than recurring.) Julian Ovenden is yet another very big get for the show.
For a bit of perspective, some of these names may not be all that well-known to U.S. TV viewers, but they certainly are in the U.K., so this is all reasonably important casting news
Tom Cullen as Lord Gillingham, an old family friend of the Crawleys who visits the family as a guest for a house party
Nigel Harman as Green, a valet
Dame Harriet Walter as Lady Shackleton, an old friend of the Dowager
Joanne David in a guest role as the Duchess of Yeovil
Julian Ovenden as aristocrat Charles Blake
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa as a guest who sings in the house
'Raising Adam Lanza' and PBS' week on Newtown
Photo credit: Newsday/Thomas A. Ferrara
PBS will devote a considerable amount of airtime next week to the horrific shootings in Newton, Conn., last December, and I've just seen one of the most highly anticipated programs in the lineup, "Raising Adam Lanza," about the 20-year-old killer who took a Bushmaster rifle to Sandy Hook Elementary School and slaughtered 20 first-graders and six adults. (Go here to find out more...
Read more »'Downton Abbey:' Third season review
Photo credit: Carnival Films
As you may be aware, "Downton Abbey" wraps its third season Sunday night. And do not worry, a fourth is coming (I'm assuming this fall.). Here's my review in tomorrow's paper . . .
Downton Abbey," WNET/13, Sunday, 9.
What it's about: In the third season finale — called simply the "Christmas Special" when it aired last year in the U.K. — the Crawleys head to Duneagle Castle in Scotland, seat of Robert, Earl of Grantham’s (Hugh Bonneville) cousin, Hugh 'Shrimpie' MacClare, Marquess of Flintshire (Peter Egan). Shrimpie's in an unhappy marriage, and father of a genuine wild child — Lady Rose MacClare (Lily James), last seen in a London nightclub in her cups and in the arms of a married man. Meanwhile, most of the staff remains behind at Downton, and to paraphrase Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), while the cat's away . . .
My say: Real "Downton" fans — presumably YOU — will not want to miss a second Sunday night, and not simply because this may be the most cinematically beautiful hour and thirty-two minutes of television all year (much was filmed in Scotland.) There's been some "spoiler" press about some especially dramatic turns. No reason to get into that here.
But this "Christmas Special" does manage to be both a gift and a sweeping thematic expression of what "Downton" has been about all season. The third has tracked shifting fortunes — power gained, power lost and the fragility of human dignity — but the press of time is accelerating too.
Roles are changing, particularly gender roles, and Robert remains resolutely stuck in an Edwardian past. Or as Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) observed last week, “Poor Robert. The postwar world is not being kind to him."
The Crawleys don't know it — we do — but another war looms, which will further erode the bedrock of England, or at least their England. Children are representative of that new world too but they've been particularly hard to come by here — an heir finally born to Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) who dies in childbirth. This may well be series’ creator Julian Fellowes way of saying just how tenuous that future is.
Sunday night (be warned) has a hard conclusion, but what you’ll finally be left of this luminous season is an even deeper affection — and appreciation — for this treasure.
Bottom line: Finale of a superb season does not disappoint. Grade: A+
