Phyllis Logan



Phyllis Logan (born 11 January 1956) is a Scottish actress, known for playing Lady Jane Felsham in Lovejoy (1986–93) and Mrs Hughes (later Carson) in Downton Abbey (2010–15). She won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer for the 1983 film Another Time, Another Place. Her other film appearances include Secrets & Lies (1996) and Shooting Fish (1997)

Education
Logan was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, and grew up in nearby Johnstone, where she was educated at Johnstone High School. She studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow and graduated with the James Bridie gold medal in 1977.

Career
After graduation, she joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre. She left in 1979 to work on stage in Edinburgh. She also worked regularly on Scottish television. On the BBC Scotland production, The White Bird Passes, she first met writer-director Michael Radford. For his first feature film, Another Time, Another Place (1983), he cast Logan in the leading role of Janie, for which she won a Gold Award for Best Actress at the Taormina Film Festival and the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress in 1983 and the BAFTA Award for the Most Outstanding Newcomer to Film in 1984. Before her recent success in Downton Abbey, Logan was most identified with the role of Lady Jane Felsham, co-starring with Ian McShane for eight years in nearly 50 episodes of Lovejoy, a comedy-drama for television.

She has also had a part in the 1996 Mike Leigh film Secrets & Lies. Logan provided the broadcast voice of Ingsoc in a film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and the Loch Ness Monster in the cartoon Freddie as F.R.O.7 (1992). She was in the radio series Coming Alive and Baggage. She played Inspector Frost's love interest in If Dogs Run Free, the last story in the A Touch of Frost series and marries him. She has played Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper, in all six seasons of the period drama Downton Abbey (2010-2015).

Personal life
Logan met actor Kevin McNally in 1994, and they married on August 15, 2011. Their son David was born in 1996. The family lives in Chiswick.