Upstairs, Downstairs - Out of Costume - After Upstairs, Downstairs 1

Upstairs, Downstairs met The Forsyte Saga in the BBC’s 1977 adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Nicola Pagett played the title role opposite Eric Porter as her husband Karenin. Porter, of course, had given one of the all-time great television performances as Soames in the BBC’s classic The Forsyte Saga in 1967 – a serial which directly inspired Upstairs, Downstairs. Newspaper The Evening News claimed: "Nicola Pagett has created the classic Anna. She doesn't appear to be acting. She is Anna Karenina."

After Upstairs, Downstairs, Christopher Beeny was chiefly known for sitcoms like The Rag Trade, Last Of The Summer Wine and In Loving Memory. However, he also popped up on children's song-and-dance show Playaway (pictured with Floella Benjamin and Brian Cant). Other well-known (or soon-to-be well-known) guest faces appearing on Playaway included Anita (Eastenders) Dobson, Nerys (Liver Birds) Hughes, Julie (Rock Follies) Covington, Tony (Black Adder) Robinson and, most famously, Jeremy (Brideshead Revisited) Irons.

Gordon Jackson’s career continued briskly after Upstairs, Downstairs. Apart from the brain-dead The Professionals, he also starred as solicitor Noel Strachen in the excellent 1981 Australian mini-series A Town Like Alice. In the UK, the series drew audiences of more than 16 million.

In early 1982, Jacqueline Tong appeared in ITV's long-running soap Coronation Street. She appeared as Jackie Moffatt, neighbour to Gail Tilsley (played then, as now, by Helen Worth). Gail's husband Brian was working abroad in Qatar and he failed to return home during some leave, preferring to spend the time with his workmates. Jackie insisted on cheering up Gail by treating her to girls' nights out, much to the chagrin of Gail's mother-in-law, Ivy. Click on the picture for a larger version.

The 21-year-old Lesley-Anne Down found Upstairs, Downstairs the first rung on the ladder to fame which would later see her go on to star in the mega-soap Dallas. Her earlier career was rather less well paid and she had resorted to posing for a syndicated set of tasteful topless photographs in 1975. In the UK they were published in Mayfair, which informed us: "Daughter of a caretaker, she was born in Putney, South London, and began her career at the age of 10 by enrolling for a modelling course. Two years later she was one of the country's top child fashion models and soon appearing in a succession of films, like That Smashing Bird I Used to Know, All the Right Noises and Scallawag [sic]. Her failure to get a part in That'll Be the Day left her open for the role in her favourite TV series, Upstairs, Downstairs. 'It was fantastic,' she said. 'I never missed an episode.' A willowy five feet seven, 33-22-33, Lesley shares a King's Road flat and spends what spare time she has very unaristocratically - swimming and watching football." The magazine added: "Although this Mayfair is Lesley's first unclothed photographic sequence, she received an offer to strip when she was only 14 for a sexy film." Ahem!!!

In 1981, Lesley-Anne Down appeared in Unity, a BBC2 play about the true-life story of Unity Mitford, a wealthy British woman who travelled to Germany as part of a delegation representing Oswald Mosley's British Union Of Fascists. She became obsessed with meeting Hitler, and used her charms to become counted amongst his closest friends. It has even been speculated that she became pregnant by Hitler and, back in Britain, bore his child. Lesley-Anne is pictured above with Ernst Jacobi as Hitler.