Michelle Dockery will soon be a mother. The British actress who became famous for playing Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey revealed her pregnancy Wednesday, at the London premiere of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, which debuts in theaters September 12.
Looking ravishing in a powder-blue gown, the actress showed off her baby bump. The child will be the first for Dockery and husband Jasper Waller-Bridge—younger brother of Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge—who accompanied Dockery on the red carpet.
The actress and her husband, a creative director of a management company, were married in 2023 in an intimate London ceremony. Their wedding came just over a year after they announced their engagement in the pages of the Times, in a very classic and formal manner. The pair have not discussed how they met, though they were first spotted together in 2019, at the Rome Film Festival. They married at St. Nicholas Church in Chiswick, London.
Dockery’s romance with Waller-Bridge follows her relationship with partner John Dineen, who died in 2015 at age 34 from a rare form of cancer. Allen Leech, who plays Tom Branson on Downton, had introduced them. “I refer to myself as a widow, yes. We were engaged, and married at heart, and so I do consider myself a widow,” the actress told the Guardian of her fiancé in the aftermath of his passing. “I’ve never been more committed to anything in my life than to him. So at the time everything just shut down. Work, everything. Work didn’t matter. You suddenly become an [oncological] expert. This stuff becomes your world, and that of course was my priority.”
This story originally appeared in VF Italia.
