Ivana Lowell talks about spinning her high-drama family tales into “House of Guinness” with the “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight.
Nothing about being a Guinness is uncomplicated. Ask Ivana Lowell, a scion of the brewing dynasty and a creator of the new Netflix drama “House of Guinness.”
“‘Succession’ with beer and brutality” is how The Times of London neatly summarized the series, which stars James Norton and Louis Partridge. It begins with the death of the brand’s 19th-century proprietor, Sir Benjamin Guinness, at the time the richest man in Ireland, and tracks the fortunes of his four children as they fight for control of an empire built on stout.
Ms. Lowell had the idea for a series over a decade ago while spending the Christmas holidays with her cousin, the Anglo-Irish aesthete Desmond Guinness — son of a baron and the most notorious of the Mitford sisters — at his 12th-century castle in County Kildare.
“I was staying with Desmond and many other Guinnesses at Leixlip,” Ms. Lowell, 59, said by phone from London. “We were halfheartedly watching ‘Downton Abbey,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, our family is so much more interesting and eccentric.’”
Back home in Sag Harbor, New York, Ms. Lowell wrote up a treatment outlining the tale of the beer’s creation by the inventor Arthur Guinness — “He’s the one on the bottle,” she said — and tracing the arc of the family fortunes to Sir Benjamin, by then proprietor of the largest brewery in Europe.
Six years would elapse before Ms. Lowell teamed up with Steven Knight, the creator of “Peaky Blinders,” who fashioned a story that moved “House of Guinness” from development limbo and into production.
“Steve had the idea of starting the show with the reading of Benjamin’s will,” Ms. Lowell said. “Benjamin leaves the brewery and all his money to his two sons, and they have to battle it out.”
Set against the industrial backdrop of 19th-century Dublin (Northern England, in reality), a city then caught up in a revolutionary movement to shake off British rule, “House of Guinness” looks nothing like the genteel warhorse of a franchise that gave rise to it.
“It’s not ‘Downton Abbey’ — it’s gritty,’’ Ms. Lowell said. “I’m nervous about what the family will say.”
She need not worry. If there is one characteristic shared by members of a sprawling clan with a knack for making tabloid headlines, it is a heightened sense of their own effect. “The thing about my family is that they are all very dramatic and eccentric and have a good sense of humor,” she continued. “These are the stories that I’ve always heard. But it’s a drama, not history, so Steve was free to invent.”
Mr. Knight found the family material easy to work with: “I felt it was an embarrassment of riches (though the Guinnesses don’t do embarrassment, fortunately),” he said in an email.
One fictitious addition was strictly Ms. Lowell’s own: “I wanted a sexy foreman who took off his shirt a lot,” she said of the character portrayed by Mr. Norton.
“House of Guinness” is not Ms. Lowell’s first foray into her family’s back pages. In the 2010 memoir “Why Not Say What Happened?” she recounted, in admirably measured prose, the harrowing story of her upbringing in a rundown English manor by parents and guardians of whom the most charitable thing that could be said was that they were epically negligent.
When Ms. Lowell was 6, she was sexually abused by the husband of her nanny, she writes. An accident with a kettle caused third-degree burns over much of her body, leaving her with lifelong scars. The man she believed to be her father — Caroline Blackwood’s second husband, the pianist Israel Citkowitz — would prove to be no relation. She learned that her biological father was the screenwriter Ivan Moffatt, one of her mother’s lovers. Her sister Natalya died of a heroin overdose at 18.
“I have no idea how I survived it all,” Ms. Lowell said. “I think because I didn’t know any better or any worse. I was burned and raped and abused, and that’s just how it was. If you don’t know any different, you think this is normal. The Guinness sense of humor helped.”
Dark humor is the family brand. Ms. Lowell noted an expression invoked by Guinnesses whenever fate took a wrong turn: “This is bad, even for us.”
As she helped develop the series, she drew on tales recounted by her grandmother Maureen Guinness and her mother, the brilliant, acidulous, alcoholic writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was married to — among others — the painter Lucian Freud and the American poet Robert Lowell.
“My grandmother Maureen and her two sisters, Aileen and Oonagh, known as the ‘Glorious Guinness Girls,’ could have a whole series based on their outrageous antics,” Ms. Lowell said. “That generation was spoiled and pampered and allowed to get away with whatever they wanted.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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