Downton Abbey star Imelda Staunton announces plans for third and final film

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Downton Abbey followers can breathe sighs of aid as Imelda Staunton, a star of the sequence’ two movies, has confirmed {that a} additional version is within the works.

Rumours of a third film main on from the massively fashionable ITV interval drama have been swirling for months, in addition to whispers of a seventh season of the tv present since final summer season.

Staunton featured on Wednesday’s version (20 March) of The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show on Radio 2.

As effectively as speaking about her West End return within the London Palladium manufacturing of Hello Dolly!, the actor and singer, 68, additionally gave a touch about the way forward for Downton.

When requested by Ball whether or not she’d be capable of share something about plans for the Downton story, Staunton replied: “There will be the final film – there you go.”

The sequence, which initially aired on ITV from 2010 to 2015, adopted the lives of an aristocratic Yorkshire household within the years between 1912 and 1926, and featured an ensemble solid that included Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Joanne Froggatt, Dan Stevens and Jessica Brown Findlay.

In the 2019 film Downton Abbey, and the 2022 sequel Downton Abbey: A New Era, Staunton performed the character Lady Maud Bagshaw – a verbal sparring associate of Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham.

Lady Bagshaw is a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, in addition to a cousin of the Crawleys, the story’s central household.

Though the second film grossed $92.7m (£73m) worldwide, The Independent’s two-star overview likened it to “a dinner party guest that won’t shut up and go home”.

Last month, a report within the Daily Mail claimed that a revival sequence started filming just a few weeks prior, and is anticipated to reach on screens “by the end of the year”.

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The outlet quoted a supply near the manufacturing as saying: “Filming has been going on for a few weeks now, it is all very, very secret. There are people working on it who have never seen secrecy like it.

“Those working on the set have been made to sign non-disclosure agreements so that they don’t give the game away but there is a lot of excitement at the return of Downton.”

However, the sequence has not been commissioned for ITV, The Independent understands.