Elizabeth McGovern

Her year at Juilliard made her believe the stage was where she wanted to be. “I fell in love with the craft of it, the challenge of it.” But the movie business is in Los Angeles, she points out, and the theatre is more of a New York business; in America at the time, the two disciplines diverged a lot more than they do today, or than they do in Britain. “In those days, people were either movie actors or theatre actors,” she says. “I wanted to figure out how to be an actor in the theatre. I wanted to master that.”

But acting for the stage didn’t come smoothly to her. “It wasn’t as easy as being in front of a camera. That seemed like the easiest thing in the world, right from the start.” Acting for the stage was harder, she says, because it required her to do things that felt unnatural. “It sounds silly, but first of all you have to talk really loud.” Doing plays, she says, takes time and experience in a way that acting for a camera does not.

Regular stage appearances

She appeared regularly on stage during the 1980s and 1990s in the US, including in a series of Shakespeare plays at the Public Theater such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It. She also appeared Off-Broadway and made her Broadway debut in AR Gurney’s Love Letters in 1989.

“Being in any Shakespeare play, you really fall in love with it,” McGovern says. You sometimes feel sorry for the audience, because if you work on it, you get past all the stuff that’s boring and not understandable, and you just feel the magic of the words, and also the great humanity of it, the wisdom. I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare and I’ve always felt this way. I’ve always felt sort of elevated when I’m doing it, because you’re hearing these words every single night. That is a privilege as well.”

In the following decades, after she married British director and producer Simon Curtis, she took a series of starring roles on the UK stage. These included The Misanthrope at the Young Vic in 1996, Hurlyburly at the Old Vic the following year, Three Days of Rain at the Donmar Warehouse in 1999 and at the National Theatre in Sunset at the Villa Thalia in 2016. In 2019, she performed opposite Matthew Broderick in the West End revival of The Starry Messenger.

Her training and persistence, she says, taught her a lot about being “on top of a craft, or an instrument, or whatever you want to call it”. And it has modelled her into the actor she is today. “I don’t think I could have held my own to start with in the cast of Downton Abbey, as the only American, and in that calibre of cast, if I hadn’t spent a lot of time doing theatre.”

In the period drama, McGovern plays Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, born in 1868. Her character is an American heiress who married into the British aristocracy by way of Hugh Bonneville’s Robert Crawley. Her mother, the terrifying Dowager Countess, is played by Maggie Smith.

When considering the very best scripts she’s been involved with, Downton is the first one McGovern mentions. “There are moments in Downton Abbey [where] I really thought, wow, this is a real privilege to be a part of this writing,” she says, smiling. “Most of the first season, I felt that way. And then there was a particular time in the third season, after the death of my daughter.” When Lady Cora’s youngest daughter, Sybil, goes into a difficult labour, both the lives of the mother and unborn baby are on the line. The child survives, but Sybil dies. “I felt that Julian [Fellowes, Downton’s screenwriter] wrote in a really amazing way about the stages of grief,” McGovern says. “I felt very privileged to be participating in the telling of the story in that way.”

‘I believe a writer has a music to their words. I read the script aloud, so I kind of hear the music of the dialogue’

A good script is critical to her saying yes to a project. “Any actor is only as good as the writing that they’ve been given,” she says. “People make this mistake all the time. They think a script isn’t very good, but we’ll have great costumes, great actors and a great cinematographer. No one will notice the script isn’t that good.” She shakes her head. “It never works. It’s all about the script.”

When she first approaches a text, she unpicks it like a detective. “Obviously I study my own part,” she says, “but also my part in relation to everybody else. It’s not just about who you are, but where you live in terms of the other characters. What is your status and relation to them? What is it you’re doing to them or want from them?” She reads the script over and over. “I believe a writer has a music [to their words]. I read aloud, so I kind of hear the music of the dialogue.”

And when she goes out on stage, her focus is her character’s objective. “It’s most helpful to me to think about what the character wants and what they need, and then to tell myself all I’ve got to do when I walk out on that stage is to get what I need or what I want. The rest will happen – if you’ve got your lines, you’re wearing the clothes, you’re very open to being in the moment with the other actors, the rest of it you don’t really have to worry about.”

Opening for Sting

Alongside acting, McGovern is part of a collective that came about, again, almost by accident. “It started probably 15 years ago,” she says. “I had two kids who were quite young and I was at home a lot with them. To give myself an escape, I was playing my guitar a lot. I thought I should take some lessons to give myself some focus. I saw an ad from a guy in the local paper, so I started taking lessons from him. It evolved very quickly into a songwriting session once a week.”

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After about a year, he said his brother wanted to start a label, so why didn’t they take their songs to him to record? That’s how McGovern and Simon and Steve Nelson started a country band: Sadie and the Hotheads. “We started recording these albums just in various kitchens all around west London. Then years later, somebody heard one of the albums we made and sent it to a music agency in London, which liked it. We did incredible things with this motley group of musicians who had all been just friendly, and who had all given their time and energy early on for no recompense whatsoever.” The best part? “We opened for Sting at the Montreux Jazz Festival. It was the best night of my life.”

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Q&A

What was your first non-theatre job?
I scooped popcorn at La Reina Theatre in Los Angeles. I worked at the Renaissance fair. My best friend – the director Todd Haynes – his dad had an import export business where he used to import mirrors and our job was to open the boxes and clean off every mirror before it went on sale.

What was your first professional theatre job?
To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry, in New York, in a tiny Off-Broadway theatre.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
You’re doing fine, don’t worry so much.

Who or what is your biggest influence?
My parents.

What is your best advice for auditions?
Learn to love them, even if you hate them.

If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have done?
Something to do with dance or music.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
I like to get quiet before a show.

Both her roles as an actor and musician share the buzz of being in front of a live audience. But McGovern says she finds singing far scarier. “I find performing the music 10 times more terrifying because I don’t do it as much,” she says. “In order to find a real relaxation, you have to do it all the time, or at least I do. Even though we had some wonderful tours and performances, I never felt like I had a chance to do it as much as I needed to in order to really live in it. Whereas I feel like now when I do something in the theatre as an actor, there isn’t that total degree of terror.”

Audience responses

The responses of the audience are different too. In acting, she says, you learn from your audience. “They teach you about rhythm, about moments that are flagging in energy. You can really feel it when you start to lose them.” In music, she’s repeatedly been shocked at how little the audience actually listens. “In the UK, they talk all the way through, or they sing.” She moves the phone from one hand to the other. “When you’re an actor, no matter how bad the play is, it’s very rare that somebody’s going to talk right through it, or loudly get a beer and call out to their friends.”

In her years on stage and screen, McGovern has appeared opposite some of the best-known names in Hollywood. In 1984, she was Robert de Niro’s love interest Deborah Gelly in Sergio Leone’s gangster movie Once Upon a Time in America, and in 1994, she played a cheating girlfriend, screwing over Brad Pitt in The Favor. Her roles tend to have a sense of grace to them, an elegance; her portfolio also includes the Harold Pinter-scripted adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Changeling, The Chaperone and the TV adaptation of War of the Worlds.

This question of how a person is understood – by their private life, their public persona, or their work – is what initially drew her to the story of Ava Gardner. Later this month, McGovern will perform in her own adaptation of Ava: The Secret Conversations at Riverside Studios in London. “It’s an escape into a glamorous past,” she says, “and it tries to look at the toll it took on the people who participated in it.”

‘Ava: The Secret Conversations is an escape into a glamorous past; it tries to look at the toll it took on the people who participated in it’

She was first drawn in by the book, written by Peter Evans and the Golden Age Hollywood star. “It’s not really a biography,” she says. “It’s the story of a biographer trying to get a life story out of a person, which is a slightly different thing.” In the book, Ava pours out her life to a writer she hires when her starry life has faded to a much quieter one. Directed by Gaby Dellal, Anatol Yusef will play the role of the journalist. “I thought that was a really interesting idea,” McGovern says, “a way to explore so much about personality, to put these two people – the biographer and his subject – in a room together and watch the process unfold. I felt like there were a lot of things that could be addressed if we explored that process. Who controls the story of biography?”

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This will be her first piece of writing for the stage. “It was something that I really understood,” she says. “I think all those years I spent writing songs really gave me confidence, because for me, songwriting was really writing interior monologues and putting them to music, and this was kind of an extension of that. It was interior thoughts put into a conversation between two people. I don’t know if I could have done one if I hadn’t done the other.”

In Ava, she wanted to explore how fame, and particularly Hollywood fame, twists and changes a life. “One of the things that really interested me about Ava’s life,” she says, “was an opportunity to look at somebody who found herself in the middle of this very macho machine, which is the movie business, and to look at how she dealt with it at that time. It’s an opportunity to explore the impact that a life of being famous had had on her. And by extension, the impact that fame and the movie business in my experience has on everybody who becomes very famous, at least the people who I’ve observed in my life.”

Feeling of kinship

Her personal experience gave her a feeling of kinship to the story. “It was something I felt like I could bring a lot to because I have experienced it personally. I felt like it spoke to experiences that I had a lot to say about. I have been part of the Hollywood machine.”

Being famous so young must have been dizzying. “In the past couple of years,” McGovern says carefully, “it’s really been a revelation to me how many things I accepted about the way my early days in the movie business were. About the way people behaved. I think it’s true with Ava as well, that she just accepted as fact a lot of the way it all works that we would not accept today after the last couple of years we’ve had. I think it’s interesting to see a woman surviving in that era.”

In Ava, this complex and often troubled world of fame is intertwined with a magic and nostalgia for old-school Hollywood. “It’s partly an homage to the way movies used to be,” McGovern says, “which they just aren’t anymore. I hope when people go to this show, they’re able to escape back into this Hollywood world, which in some ways was a very cruel, exacting world for Ava, but it also offered up a lot of mystery and glamour that I think we’ve lost in today’s world.”

She adds: “We know so damn much about everybody all the time, and there’s so many ways that everybody can become famous. It’s lost its mystique. It’s lost its beauty.”

CV Elizabeth McGovern

Born: 1961, Illinois
Training: Juilliard, New York
Landmark productions:
Theatre:
• Love Letters, Edison  Theatre, Broadway (1989)
• Hamlet, Criterion Center Stage Right, Broadway (1992)
• The Misanthrope,  Young Vic, London (1996)
• Hurlyburly, Old Vic,  London (1997)
• Three Days of Rain,  Donmar Warehouse,  London (1999)
• Aristo, Minerva Theatre, Chichester (2008)
• Sunset at the Villa Thalia, National Theatre (2016)
• Time and the Conways, American Airlines  Theatre, Broadway (2017)
• The Starry Messenger, Wyndham’s Theatre,  London (2019)
Film:
• Ordinary People (1980)
• Ragtime (1981)
• Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
• The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)

Ava: The Secret Conversations runs at London’s Riverside Studios January 18-April 16