Michelle Dockery had big news to share at Wednesday’s premiere of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale in London: She and her husband of two years, Jasper Waller-Bridge, are expecting their first child.
Dockery and Waller-Bridge married in 2023. He is a film and TV producer, music manager, and the brother of Fleabag and Killing Eve creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
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Dockery, 43, attended the formal event to promote her role as Lady Mary in what’s billed as the final installment of the Crawley family saga.
The actress was part of the cast for the period drama on TV, which aired for six seasons between 2010 and 2015, as well as in the big-screen takes Downton Abbey (2019) and Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022). The newest installment, Downtown Abbey: The Grand Finale, arrives in theaters Sept. 12.
Her character is the mother to a son named George, whom she shared with her first husband, Matthew. After he died, she had a daughter, Caroline, with her second husband, Henry Talbot, but their union didn’t last.
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“I love kids, but Mary’s not the most natural of mothers,” she told the U.K.’s Express in October 2014. “That’s just not who she is — or rather, that’s not how people were in those days. Lady Mary is an aristocrat, so she doesn’t see her child for more than two hours a day — that’s not the sort of cuddly, cooey relationship I would have with a baby.”
Before she was married, Dockery was engaged to John Dineen, a public relations executive who died of cancer in 2015.
In addition to Downton Abbey, where her work has garnered her three Emmy nominations, Dockery has appeared in TV’s Good Behavior and Anatomy of a Scandal, as well as in movies including The Gentlemen and Flight Risk.
