Michelle Dockery, best known for her Emmy-nominated performance as Lady Mary Crawley in the BBC/PBS hit “Downton Abbey,” is engaged to Jasper Waller-Bridge, who is also a bit of British television royalty. You see, Waller-Bridge is the brother of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of “Fleabag” and “Killing Eve.”
Dockery, 40, and Waller-Bridge, 34, publicly announced their engagement in England’s The Times in a notice that was very un-Hollywood.
“The engagement is announced between Jasper, son of Michael Waller-Bridge of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and Teresa Waller-Bridge of Battersea, London, and Michelle, younger daughter of Michael and Lorraine Dockery of Gidea Park, Essex,” the announcement stated.
The pair reportedly began dating in 2019 after being introduced by mutual friends when they were both spending time in Los Angeles over the summer. They were first seen together at the Rome Film Festival that year.
While Dockery obviously makes her living on screen, Waller-Bridge is a TV producer and currently works for the talent agency James Grant. He used to manage pop singer Louis Tomlinson, according to the Mirror.
Dockery will reprise her role as Lady Mary in “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” a new film set to be released in March. She also had parts in 2019’s “The Gentlemen” and several other television series.
Prior to this relationship, Dockery was engaged to John Dineen, a public relations executive. She began dating Dineen in 2013 after being introduced by Dockery’s “Downton Abbey” co-star Allen Leech. Dineen proposed to the actress in early 2015. However, the pair never made it down the aisle as he died suddenly from a rare form of cancer that December at the age of 34.
“Oh, I refer to myself as a widow, yes,” Dockery told The Guardian in a 2017 interview. “We were engaged, and married at heart, and so I do consider myself a widow … I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what it felt like. And what it still feels like.”
Dockery’s relationship with Waller-Bridge is reportedly her first following Dineen’s death.
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