Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville reveals his mother worked for MI6

'She was a doer – she was an absolute doer – and she was an immensely caring woman'

Bonneville: Proud of his late mother (Getty)

One of Britain’s best-known actors suspects his mother was a spy for British intelligence, after finding out by accident that she worked for MI6.

Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, the 52-year-old star of Downton Abbey Hugh Bonneville says: “When my father was out in Singapore doing his national service she went out there and did some bits of filing and stuff or whatever for the Foreign Office there.”

Mr Bonneville, who played Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, in the period drama, recalls that a few years later, “when I was about 10 she said, “I’m going to go and take a job for three days a week,” and I burst into tears and said: “You’re leaving me, you hate me. I’m going to pack my bags and leave now. You’re an awful mother.”

But his suspicion that his mother worked for British intelligence only arose by chance decades later.

“Spin forward 30 more years and she’d retired. And we used to drop her off at her office sometimes at Lambeth North and I opened the newspaper one day and it said: ‘Century House, MI6 building, to be sold’.

“I looked at the photograph and I said: “Mum, that’s your office,” and she said, “Hmmm, yes, dear,” and I said “You’re a spy!” And she said, “No, I’m not a spy, dear.”

His mother, who was nicknamed ‘the Colonel’ by friends and neighbours, died just over a year ago at the age of 85.

After her death, Mr Bonneville asked his 88-year-old father, a retired surgeon, “if she’d ever said anything about her work and he said, ‘Never, she just went to the office.’” But while the nature of her work for MI6 remains a mystery, Mr Bonneville does not think it was the stuff of spy movies.

The actor says: “So all I know is she didn’t have special umbrellas or knives coming out of her toecaps or anything like that.

“She did just work in the office but I’m extremely proud, not only that she found fulfilment in that work, as well as bringing up us kids, but that she never spoke about it.

“She was a doer – she was an absolute doer – and she was an immensely caring woman.”