Lady Mary ‘downsizes’ with a £1.7m city love nest

ACCUSTOMED to a 300- room stately pile while playing Lady Mary in Downton Abbey, Michelle Dockery has splashed out on her own property.

I can reveal that the 37-year- old actress has spent around £1.7 million on a London home.

‘It’s a lovely house and will make her and her boyfriend a beautiful home,’ a source tells me.

While £ 1.7 million might seem a lot of money, crazy London prices mean that it has bought her not a mansion but a terrace home in a bohemian north- eastern corner of the capital.

Dockery — who grew up in Romford, East London, as the daughter of a van driver and a care home assistant — has made a fortune through her role as an Earl’s daughter in the hit ITV period drama, which was turned into an equally successful feature film.

She will be able to live in the house with her new boyfriend, Jasper Waller-Bridge, a 31- year- old ‘ creative director’. The brother of

Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, he’s been courting Michelle since the summer. The pair met through mutual friends and first appeared together on the red carpet at the Rome Film Festival. Last week, he attended a screening of her latest film, Guy Ritchie’s crime caper The Gentlemen. Handsome and well- connected, Jasper works for leading talent agency James Grant, whose famous clients include Holly Willoughby, Amanda Holden and Ant and Dec. Michelle was left heartbroken when her fiance, Irish publicist John Dineen, died four years ago at the age of just 34. He had fought a 15-month battle against a rare form of cancer. They had been engaged for a year. ‘I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what it felt like,’ she said in 2017. ‘And what it still feels like. I’ve never been more committed to anything in my life than to him. So at the time everything just shut down. Work, everything. Work didn’t matter.’ A spokesman for Dockery declined to comment.