Michelle Dockery on life after Downton and playing talented, troubled Estella
If you didn’t know it already, This Town will tell you something very important about Michelle Dockery: the woman really knows how to sing. She can bring the house down or, in this case, a Catholic church in Birmingham. Known to millions since 2010 as Lady Mary Crawley of Downton Abbey, Dockery has taken a startling journey from English rose to alcoholic to play Estella Quinn, a key character who unites the younger and older generations in Steven Knight’s eight-part Midlands drama.
Expelled from Birmingham on the orders of the IRA and her gunman husband, her hopes of being a professional singer apparently in ruins and separated from her teenage son Bardon, Estella finds escape in a vodka bottle and fireworks follow.
“She’s a livewire when she drinks,” says Dockery. “Estella is troubled and she’s been exiled from her community, but I relate to her fierce spirit.” That spirit becomes gloriously apparent in one show-stopping moment, when Dockery sings in church. “When I read the script that was the scene that did it,” the 42-yearold says. “I thought, ‘I’m playing this role’.”
Singing means a lot to Dockery who, when she’s not acting, performs in Michael & Michelle, the band she formed with former Downton colleague Michael Fox. “Estella probably would have been a star,” she says. “She had the vocal prowess to be a great singer. And there’s her wistful yearning for a singing career that disappeared as she drank. And so, with all of that combined, I wasn’t just playing a character who sings. It goes far deeper than that.”
The role can be extreme. At one point Estella passes out and sleeps right through her flat being ransacked by burglars in search of her social security payment. But, as Knight’s script insists, music always offers the chance of redemption. “It’s the anchor for all of these characters,” Dockery says. “They’re struggling in some way in life, and the music roots them all.”
Dockery has often taken on darker roles. Between 2015 and 2018 she was in the TNT series Good Behavior. “I played a struggling drug addict who was an ex-convict,” she says. “That gives you a window into a life and a person’s struggle. You learn a lot about how to be [someone else] and about how other people live. I’ve never been in the situation that Estella’s in. I don’t know what it feels like, to be booted out of your community, to be dependent on alcohol.”
Estella’s tortured hedgerow of a hairdo (“I just loved getting the wig on”) and teetering heels are a long way from the formality of Downton. “I’ll always be recognised for that character,” she says of Lady Mary. “I’m so lucky with Downton, it changed my life, and I’m so p
