These Are The Downton Abbey Cast's Actual Partners

The hit series "Downton Abbey” ran for six seasons and was the winner of a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries, a Golden Globe for Best Miniseries or Television Film, a SAG Award, a Producers Guild award, and a BAFTA award (via PBS). Audiences couldn't get enough of the scandalous storylines, heart-warming relationships, and tragic endings set among the opulence of the aristocratic life. At the height of popularity in Season 4, the show was averaging about 13.4 million viewers, making it PBS's top show of all time (via Forbes).

Despite the name of the film sequel, "Downton Abbey: A New Era," fans will be happy to know that the same cast is returning once again for the second movie. The show was cast with a mix of esteemed entertainment royalty, like Dame Maggie Smith, and newer actors who have gone on to have continued success in their careers. 

Fans know the relationships and marriages of their favorite characters, but how much do you know about the real-life romances of the cast? Nearly everyone on the list is married to another entertainer, and four of the cast members are dating or married to fellow cast members from the show! Here are the real-life relationships of some of the beloved cast members of "Downton Abbey."

Unlike her character's unlucky turns, love blossomed on set for Laura Carmichael, who played Lady Edith Crawley. Carmichael is dating Michael C. Fox, who played footman Andrew "Andy" Parker on "Downton Abbey." The couple met on set, and revealed their relationship publicly with a romantic stroll through Hampstead Heath in 2016, according to the Evening Standard. Carmichael and Fox moved in together in 2019 (via The Daily Mail).

The couple chooses to stay private about their relationship, but they have revealed a few small details. In an interview with The Sunday Post, Fox said they remained professional on set and didn't put any attention on their relationship: "We'd go to work and we didn't want it to be a thing in any way when we were working together." He went on to say, "It was great, though, to go to work with your best pal. Apart from that we like to keep it quite separate from 'Downton.' The fact we met on set is not a big part of our relationship."

Mother Downton, aka Cora Crawley, was played by veteran actor Elizabeth McGovern. In real life, McGovern has been married to filmmaker Simon Curtis since 1992. She reminisced on the couple's early days to The Daily Mail in 2010, remembering back to how excited she was when Curtis once picked her up from the airport. "I thought, 'Oh my God, this is the man I'm going to marry' ... It was a sort of this-is-my-fate feeling, as if there was a part of me that knew. Then I fell pregnant and we just took it from there."

She relocated to Cheswick, England to live near Curtis when she became pregnant, and has lived a life that shares similarities to the storyline of Cora Crawley — an American woman living in England and raising English children. But McGovern has zero regrets about the decision and added, "Now I think I'm so lucky because I have a life I can live in much more happily than the one I was living in Los Angeles."

The couple worked together on the second "Downton" film sequel when Curtis took on the role of director. She told The Daily Mail, "I really feel that if you want to know what Simon's like, you should see this movie because you see his sense of humour, his warmth, his love for family and his love for all the characters that he's actually lived with for so many years via me. I was really blown away by him."

Butler Thomas Barrow, played by Robert James-Collier, had one of the most fascinating story arcs of the series. Barrow was one of the show's primary antagonists in the first few seasons, but by the time "Downton Abbey" was canceled, the character had won over the Crawley family, the staff, and audiences. In real life, James-Collier has been with Lauren Chandiram since 2007, with whom he has a son, Milo. Chandiram moved in with James-Collier in Manchester back in 2012. Her career is centered around clothing sales and design (via Mirror).

James-Collier stays incredibly private about his family life but took the opportunity to tell a funny personal story on the "The Jonathan Ross Show" in 2013. His character, Barrow, struggled with revealing his sexuality as a gay man on "Downton Abbey" and Barrow had an on-screen kiss with another male character. James-Collier figured since he hadn't kissed a woman, he wouldn't have to worry about Chandiram's potential jealousy. However, when he saw the screening of the show with Chandiram, she was less than impressed. After viewing the kiss, she turned to James-Collier and said, "You never kiss me like that."

One of the most heartbreaking storylines of "Downton Abbey" belonged to Lady Sybil Crawley, played by Jessica Brown Findlay. In the real world, Brown Findlay's love life is in full bloom, but not without its struggles. The coronavirus outbreak caused her to initially postpone her wedding to fellow actor Ziggy Heath. Eventually, during lockdown, she married Heath in a small, surprise ceremony. She told The Times, "It was wonderful — low-key and micro. After a lockdown 30 people felt huge. I wouldn't change anything about it."

Brown Findlay occasionally opens up about her private life on her Instagram. She shared small details of the wedding and was sure to mark the couple's three month anniversary with a post.

But on International Women's Day, she shared her vulnerable side and revealed that she is undergoing IVF injections to prepare for a family with Heath. "IVF has made me even more aware of just how much women are capable of and what we can achieve whilst going through pain and heart break," Brown Findlay said in the post.

Dan Stevens' time as Matthew Crawley was short-lived after the character's tragic death in the Series 3 Christmas Special. Stevens has been much luckier in love in real life. He's been married to South African jazz singer Susie Hariet since 2009. The couple met in 2006 while performing in theater shows and fell for each other almost instantly (via Bustle). Although she's often credited only as a jazz singer, Hariet has also acted on stage and had three movie roles in "Worth" (2007), "Forget Me Not" (2009), and "Dark Room" (2010).

The couple moved from London to Brooklyn Heights, New York to work and parent their three children. In 2014, Stevens told The New Yorker that the family loves New York, but the decision of where to send the kids to kindergarten was a little overwhelming for the couple. "The way people talk about kindergarten — it's sort of the way people talk about universities back home. It seems to carry the same weight and importance, which is slightly terrifying."

The character of Lady Rosamund Painswick was played by veteran actor Samantha Bond, who is married to fellow actor Alexander Hanson. The couple married in 1989 and had two children during the height of Bond's career. She and Hanson had difficulties at points in the marriage and split up for a short time when their two children were very young. They reunited and have been going strong ever since (via The Guardian).

Despite their successful acting careers, Bond once said the pair would probably not act together again. In 2010, they shared the stage once in Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband," but Bond confessed, "It actually was tricky. He'd been on Broadway for a year and I'd been doing jetsetting visits. He literally flew home on Sunday, and on Tuesday we went to work. So from having had this sort of absentee, rather glamorous husband who I went to visit in New York, suddenly there was this man in my kitchen, in my rehearsal room, in my bedroom, and it was tricky" (via Independent).

When Charles Blake entered the show, audiences were intrigued by the immediately snarky exchanges between Blake and Lady Mary. Julian Ovenden, who plays Blake, had a much warmer start to his relationship with wife and opera singer Kate Royal, despite the fact that it took them three years to start dating.

Royal told the Daily Mail that she always thought Ovenden might be perfect for her. She knew about him through mutual friends but they had a difficult time aligning their busy schedules. It was important to her that Ovenden, a West End and Broadway star, was also passionate about music. "I admire his extraordinary musical talent and gift for performing, added to which I simply couldn't imagine being with someone who was not musical, who didn't understand the way it travels with you through life," she said.

The couple have two children, Johnny and Audrey, and Royal still has a great appreciation for Ovenden's musical abilities. In an interview with Playbill, Royal listed Ovenden's performance of Sondheim's "Being Alive" at the London BBC Prom as a live performance she'll never forget. In 2016, she told The Guardian that her guilty pleasure is listening to Ovenden's recordings when he's not around. "He would be pretty embarrassed if he knew how much praise I have for his singing," she admitted.