Ivana Lowell, a scion of the Guinness brewing dynasty, recently went to the funeral of her great-great-great-grandfather, who died in 1868.
As the producer of the new Netflix drama about her own family, House of Guinness, she was on set when the opening scenes were filmed in which Sir Benjamin Guinness’s cortege is taken through Dublin.
“They had a real actor playing Benjamin lying in the coffin,” Lowell recalled. “It was such a surreal moment, attending his funeral. I was thinking ‘woah, this is odd’, but it was so much fun.”
House of Guinness, which stars James Norton and Louis Partridge, was released on Thursday and tells the story of Benjamin’s four children squabbling over the empire their father built. It is Succession with beer and brutality, and the Ireland it portrays is simmering with political, social and religious unrest.
Lowell, 59, one of the series’s executive producers, first had the idea for the drama while in Ireland with her family for Christmas about a decade ago. “We were watching Downton Abbey half-heartedly while chatting and I suddenly thought, ‘Our family would also make such a good TV show—but the difference is it’s all true’.”
She wrote a proposal, known as a treatment, tracing the family saga from the beer’s inventor Arthur Guinness, Sir Benjamin’s grandfather, to their family owning the biggest brewery in Europe at St. James’s Gate in Dublin, where it is still brewed today.
It would take another six years and Lowell teaming up with the Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight to get the series into production. Knight shifted its start to Benjamin’s death and the fight over his fortune, which is worth about $219 million today. More than 1.8 billion pints of Guinness are consumed globally each year.
House of Guinness, which was filmed in the northwest of England, is not a uniformly flattering portrayal of her forebears, but Lowell says her relatives can’t wait to watch it. “When I read Steven’s script, I thought, ‘Oh my God, what will my family think?’ We’re not painted as saints. But the love comes through—the family deeply care for each other, even though they’re pitted against each other. And the great thing about my family is that everyone has a good sense of humor and sense of the dramatic. I told them it’s not The Gilded Age, it’s not Downton, it’s gritty … but they’re all just really excited.”
Lowell drew on family stories told to her by her grandmother, Maureen Guinness, and her mother, the writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, who once eloped with Lucian Freud. “I didn’t read many history books about the Guinnesses as I knew all the basics,” Lowell explained. “Steve then filled in a lot of the blanks. And it’s a drama, it’s not history, so he was free to take some liberties with the story.”
She found that watching the show being made has brought her closer to her ancestors. “The family went against all the odds and succeeded,” she said. “It’s become such an important brand to Ireland—Guinness is part of the national pride, isn’t it? I was quite moved by it, particularly being on the set and watching these actors playing my relatives.”
Lowell would like the series to be recommissioned to keep telling the Guinness stories down the later generations, a family she admits are “drawn to the madness”.
“Hopefully we can get up to the present day—that’s the dream,” she said. “The family just gets more interesting and wacky. My grandmother Maureen and her two sisters Aileen and Oonagh, known as ‘the Glorious Guinness Girls’, could have a whole series just on them: their antics, the people they married, their wonderful outfits and their outrageous behavior.
The trio, she added, were part of the interwar generation, “glamorous like the Mitfords, but with more money”. Maureen’s misbehavior has already made it on screen: in the 2021 drama A Very British Scandal, it is Maureen who brings out a “wind-up penis” to entertain her guests; in reality, sometimes she would even put it on her nose.
Lowell has mined her own life in the past. Her memoir Why Not Say What Happened?, first published in 2010, is being re-released to coincide with the series. It is the often harrowing story of her childhood, growing up in a decaying house in the Kent countryside.
When she was six, the husband of Lowell’s nanny sexually abused her; and an accident with a kettle caused third-degree burns over much of her body, bringing her close to death and then needing several operations.
Her mother Lady Caroline, who died in 1996, was loving, but an alcoholic. Later, Lowell found out that the man she believed to be her father—Blackwood’s second husband, the pianist Israel Citkowitz — was no relation; Lowell’s biological father was one of her mother’s lovers, the screenwriter Ivan Moffat. Her sister Natayla died at 18 of a heroin overdose.
On hearing her life experiences, Lowell’s therapist said to her: “Oh my God, that’s one of the worst stories I’ve ever heard.”
Lowell said: “[Writing the memoir] was so painful, but I was also trying to understand it. As a child, you don’t have a coping mechanism and as you grow up, you think: ‘God, how do I even make sense of this?’ But by writing it, you are almost like a therapist for yourself … I tried to understand and forgive my mother a little more. Writing about it made it feel like I was spending time with her again, putting me back with her.”
The memoir is laced with black humor. “We had this family expression ‘this is too bad even for us’—like when my mum got cancer,” Lowell added. “That’s our way of coping: to laugh about it.”
And to have fun. On the last day of filming House of Guinness, Lowell and her daughter Daisy, 25, were laced into corsets to play extras. In the dressing room, Daisy turned to her mother and said proudly: “This [production] wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for you.” Lowell recalled: “We both cracked up, because Daisy usually thinks Mum’s an idiot who can’t do anything.”
Their roles, alas, ended up on the cutting room floor. “You see us for maybe a second,” Lowell laughed. “A friend froze the frame and sent me the screenshot. You won’t see us, but I know we’re there.”
House of Guinness is now streaming on Netflix
Rosamund Urwin is the media editor at The Sunday Times
