PLAYING UNDER THE PIANO

A memoir from Downton Abbey's Earl of Grantham.

One can easily imagine Bonneville (b. 1963), a debut memoirist but no novice as a storyteller, dining out for years on the tales jovially recounted here: coming up through Britain's National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company; being turned down for a part in Four Weddings and a Funeral; mistaking Melanie Griffith “for a local real estate agent”; getting angry at an annoying boy who was being disrespectful about Martin Scorsese's unibrow and learning it was Leonardo di Caprio; and the crackpot stories Shirley MacLaine told on the set of Downton. The memoir is warm, funny, leisurely paced, and generously stocked with the lore of the author’s profession. Bonneville seems aware that the worst things that have happened to him—rupturing an Achilles tendon on stage, getting marooned in Los Angeles during the gestation of a TV series marked for failure—are not what one would call Serious Narrative Conflict (he likes capital letters), but he does his best. There are a few well-handled sober moments, For example, he chronicles a time when, visiting the White House as part of a promotional tour, he hand-delivered a letter from his young son to Barack Obama asking questions about guns and violence in America. The letter was answered; the questions were not. After the Sandy Hook massacre a few months later, his conclusion is simply worded and to the point: "Has anything changed?" Bonneville is also good at thumbnail characterizations, bringing less well-known players affectionately and vividly to life. The casting director for the National Theatre during the 1980s, Gillian Diamond, “was famously intimidating, with short Jean Seberg hair and strong lips. She wouldn’t have looked out of place wearing a beret and smoking Gitanes while overseeing a printing press during a run of angry revolutionary pamphlets.”

Readers will be entertained and come away with a watch list, from Mansfield Park to W1A to the new Downton movie.