Eileen Atkins’s screen work keeps returning to people whose concerns could easily be overlooked. We particularly value her patience as a creator on Upstairs, Downstairs; as an actor, she is welcome in an ensemble without necessarily rescuing the film.
Fi1m perspective
In Wicked Little Letters (2024), Eileen Atkins joins Joanna Scanlan and Lolly Adefope for an unofficial investigation over tea. We warmed to their scenes because the shared business of working something out gives us a rest from the film’s swearing. Atkins’s Mabel belongs to the warmest stretch of Thea Sharrock’s comedy, though the gathering is also familiar. Ben Davis’s bright seaside light suits the film’s easier pleasures. None of this repairs a mystery that gives itself away or a joke stretched too far.
The more substantial reason to follow her screen work is Upstairs, Downstairs (1971), created with John Hawkesworth and Jean Marsh. The servants’ concerns have time to become important, and our attachment develops as we learn more about the people doing the work. We recommend it because the class tensions stop the household becoming too cosy, even when some of the staging is stiff. Giving a large company of characters that much attention takes patience, which the series repays. Atkins’s contribution belongs to a shared achievement; singling her out should not mean forgetting the other names.
That work as a creator continued with Marsh on The House of Eliott (1991–94), alongside an acting career that remained centred on the theatre. Her screenplay for Mrs Dalloway (1997), adapting Virginia Woolf’s novel, is a useful reminder that she has done more than devise television households. Writing and performing have run alongside one another, without a tidy handover from one to the other. Her part as Mrs Croft in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001) brought the acting back to the class divisions familiar from her television work.
We should be careful about praising Atkins merely for seeming at home in a period setting. The better test is how much attention the work gives to people who could have been left in the background. Upstairs, Downstairs passes that test; Wicked Little Letters only briefly finds room for them before returning to its tiring central joke. We would start with the series, allowing for a little stiffness in the staging.
Biography
Dame Eileen Atkins is an English actress and writer. She was born on 16 June 1934 in Clapton, London, and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Atkins has worked extensively in theatre, film and television since the 1950s. She is known for film roles including Mrs Croft in Gosford Park (2001), Maddy in Cold Mountain (2003), Madame Kozlova in Paddington 2 (2017) and Mabel in Wicked Little Letters (2024), as well as Queen Mary in the series The Crown (2016).
She co-created the television series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975) with Jean Marsh and has received three Olivier Awards, a BAFTA and an Emmy. She was appointed DBE in 2001.
