If your family meals have turned explosive since Trump ascended, consider dinner conversations at the Mitfords’ well-appointed table.
One daughter was Hitler’s intimate friend. Another left her husband for Britain’s fascist leader. One sister was a Communist, and the eldest a rather arch writer. Two other sisters and a brother were quieter by comparison.
Their beleaguered parents tried to carry on as the aristocracy always had, despite being mortified by whatever scandal a daughter visited upon them.
Outrageous, a compelling six-episode drama premiering on BritBox on June 18, focuses on life among the privileged as they’re losing that privilege. It’s an incisive take on feminism, fascism, and family as Europe roiled from 1931 through 1937, which the first season covers.
“The thing about the ’30s is that women had only just got the vote in the UK,” says Sarah Williams, creator and writer. “These women came of age when so much was changing. And they were very self-aware. They knew the aristocracy was crumbling. They knew they were anachronisms. They used to call their parents the feudal remnants.”
Born into a gilded world, the sisters were confident, smart, and endlessly compelling, as far as the British tabs were concerned.
“All the people they knew, and the places they went, they just went out into the world with this sense of confidence,” Williams says. “‘Well, why wouldn’t I know Hitler? Why wouldn’t I know Churchill?’”
About 20 years ago, a friend gave Williams a Christmas gift, Molly Lovell’s exhaustively researched tome, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family.
“I immediately thought, there’s a series here, and long-form television was the perfect vehicle,” Williams recalls. “Various people had tried a film idea, or a this or that, or maybe take one sister and do her story, and I thought it’s a hell of a lot of information, but on the other hand, it’s a true-life Downton Abbey.”
The Mitfords are far more captivating than the Crawleys, and this is coming from someone incapable of moving once Downton’s theme song starts. The very real Mitfords, though well-known in the UK, don’t register with Americans.
Upon reading the book, Williams immediately wrote an outline and treatment, and proudly set off into the world of television, thinking “this will be snapped up in a moment,” she recalls. “And it so wasn’t.”
Eventually, Williams’ project made its way to Firebird Pictures, where Matthew Mosley is an executive producer. He’s a great-grandson of Oswald Mosley, founder of Britain’s fascist party and Diana Mitford’s second husband. The coincidence reinforced that Outrageous finally found the right home.
Mosley didn’t know his great-grandfather. “But it’s definitely something the family has had to grapple with and deal with,” he says. “My grandfather, most of all, because he was the son, and everything was so fresh, and people would know the name instantly.
“Oswald Mosley is a very well-known figure in the UK and was quite regularly invoked,” Mosley adds. “For my generation, probably a bit less so. But still, even now, whenever people are talking about right-wing politics in the UK, Oswald Mosley’s name is mentioned.”
The parallels to today’s global political landscape, with fascism rising, Jews attacked, and families torn apart over politics, are lost on no one.
“Of course, as we’ve gone forward, it’s only become more relevant,” Mosley says. “It’s quite extraordinary. There are lines in the show now that I almost sort of hear myself saying. In Episode Four, Nancy walks down the street and says, ‘It’s like the world’s gone mad. Why has everyone gone so extreme right now?’”
“There was also the feeling of war impending,” Williams adds. “And really, two days ago, the British Prime Minister made a defense spending announcement, saying we are making Britain battle-ready. It is that feeling of we’re hurtling towards something, some crisis. Some things are getting out of control and moving too quickly; people are going a bit mad.”
Just as we’re reeling from the news now, the Mitfords were then. Their reactions are captured by eldest sister Nancy’s sly narration, which Bessie Carter provides.
The only child of actors Jim Carter (Mr. Carson on Downton) and Imelda Staunton (mother and daughter are co-starring in a West End play), she attended the same school as Nancy Mitford (Francis Holland). In an even more surprising coincidence, Carter narrated Nancy’s autobiographical novel, The Pursuit of Love. The actress found it too weird to listen to herself while prepping, so she listened to someone else’s audiobook of Mitford’s Wigs on the Green and read Love in a Cold Climate.
“It helps so much because her writing is so sort of informative for how her brain works and how quick-witted and observant and funny and yet stern,” Carter says. “All of these things really, really helped me find her.”
Nancy was “a fiercely intelligent writer, a hopeless romantic, and, I think, a very empathetic eldest sister who tried desperately to be the glue to hold her family together,” she says. “She was a woman battling with responsibility versus independence. They were all very ahead of their time. They didn’t want to conform to the career that were meant for women at the time, which was being a wife, a mother, and running a household. It just wasn’t enough. They wanted more.”
“The message that I would love people to take away from this series is you see these six women repeatedly not being listened to, their voices not being given a valued place in society,” Carter adds. “And if people don’t feel that they’re contributing to society, that they’re needed, wanted, and respected, they will scream louder. The voiceless will scream louder.”
During the 14-week shoot, the actresses mulled over who their characters were and how they fit together. Diana, the great beauty among the sisters, married the heir of the Guinness fortune, had two sons, and lived an elegant and rarified existence. Then, she fell hopelessly in love with the married, charismatic Mosley. Diana didn’t want to be one of his many sidepieces and instead exploded her family.
Of all the sisters, she’s the most glamorous, swanning about in exquisite outfits.
“It was so not practical,” Joanna Vanderham says of her costumes, which required assistance to use the bathroom. “It was not chic. But I felt like I could kind of rule the world.”
While filming a December scene, it was about 95 degrees. “They had to safety pin an ice pack to my slip so that I wasn’t overheating,” Vanderham says. “And Shan runs and gives me a hug, squeezed it out, and it was like a dog, like I weed all over myself.”
Shan is Shannon Watson, who plays Unity, the sister obsessed with Hitler. Unity persuaded her parents to let her stay in Germany, ostensibly for more of a finishing school. After stalking Hitler, she was eventually taken into his inner circle. While there, Unity wrote a letter to a German newspaper praising the Führer and railing against Jews. That letter became major news and caused a chasm in the family.
“Nancy used to call her ‘head of bone, heart of stone,’” Watson says. “She was always described as the awkward one, the one that didn’t have enough mustard to keep up with the older two. And then Decca and Debo also had their own bond. So, she was kind of in the middle, and she had a lot to prove.”
Unity was the sister between Diana and Jessica, known as Decca. Decca, as Zoe Braugh, who plays her, observes, “was very unwavering in her opinions.” A Communist disgusted by her family’s wealth–despite it quickly vanishing–Decca eloped with her second cousin. She became a journalist, best known for An American Way of Death.
If people outside of the UK know the Mitfords today, it’s usually because of Nancy’s novels or Jessica’s non-fiction. I had been assigned the latter in journalism school and became a lifelong fan.
In 1991, while drinking at an Oakland Tribune newspaper party (cue the shocking music), a friend said someone wanted to meet me. Led to a back booth and holding a Tiki mug cocktail, I was introduced to Jessica Mitford. She complimented my stories. (I was writing about racism and injustice.) Flabbergasted that one of my heroes knew my work, I did something ridiculous: I curtsied.
Decca was as strident about fighting fascists as her sisters were about supporting them. The series follows the Mitfords through the war years. Sets, costumes, hair, and makeup are spot-on, though Vanderham acknowledges they intentionally changed the accent.
“They were so posh, and so we’ve toned it down so that it’s more relatable,” she says.
Lord and Lady Redesdale (James Purefoy and Anna Chancellor) reared their daughters to be independent—but not too much so. They were expected to marry well after their debutante seasons.
“He is an insect trapped in amber,” James Purefoy says of the patriarch. “He’s a man who is not of this time; he is stuck in a late Edwardian, early Victorian time, and he’s happy in that.”
Even playing a man, already out of step nearly a century ago, doesn’t dilute how surprisingly relevant Outrageous feels.
“It is incredibly timely,” Purefoy says. “I mean, seeing people latching on to pretty extreme views on left and right.”
“They didn’t understand where it was leading,” Purefoy says of people in the 1930s. “And that’s what I find absolutely astonishing about people today–they do know where it leads. They have the benefit of hindsight, and yet they continue. To me, that’s far more obscene.”
The actors vow they’d immediately sign if the series is renewed. Williams says she could see telling the story in three seasons. Mosley promotes that it has everything. “It has affairs, it has betrayal, heartache, and sibling rivalry,” he says. “As we were going through the process of developing the show, we would say, you just could not make it up.”
Who would have believed that the world would find itself in much the same mindset as then?
“I feel there are foreboding storm clouds above us,” Carter says. “It’s such a shame because we have the power of hindsight now, and yet we’re not using it. We know where it all leads, and yet we’re still going down this path.”
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