Elizabeth McGovern: my daughters helped me understand sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth McGovern makes a zip gesture across her mouth and giggles. I am quizzing her about her new film, Downton Abbey: A New Era, in which she reprises the role of Lady Cora. Fan forums are currently ablaze with the question of whether Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess will die. Smith is in the trailer for the new film (in the set-up), but I note she is absent from a big wedding scene clip shown later. I ask McGovern whether the peppery octogenarian Crawley has finally given up the ghost?

She is, of course, cagey. “Literally, out of respect for my own life.” Then she leans forward conspiratorially and whispers: “But suffice to say, you’ve been very observant and I’m impressed.”

Elegant and composed, McGovern is perched, cross-legged on a turquoise sofa at the Riverside Studios in London, overlooking the Thames at Hammersmith, where she is in rehearsals for Ava: the Secret Conversations, a one-woman show about Ava Gardner which she has adapted from a biography by Peter Evans (which takes the form of a series of conversations he had with the star who died in 1990). She wears the standard artists’ uniform of black skinny jeans and a black top, grey-brown hair swept into a casual ponytail.

Julian Fellowes’s wildly successful costume drama is McGovern’s longest-running job, as she appeared in all six series and in the first film which came out in 2018. She describes it as a privilege because “I’ve watched the girls that play my daughters [Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and until the third season, Jessica Brown Findlay] grow up and blossom, and that’s happened in real-time, and so when it comes to doing a scene with them, there’s all this built-in feeling that is completely not acting, it’s just there. Because I do have daughters [Matilda, 28, and 23-year-old Grace], it’s a parallel that really strikes a chord in me.”

Her real-life husband, Simon Curtis, whom she married in 1992, is also the film’s director. She’s worked with him before, in an “all too weird” coincidence, on the delicious (and oddly forgotten) 2008 sitcom Freezing, in which Hugh Bonneville (her husband in Downton), played her husband. Her character was an American actor in London, cast in, well, a costume drama by Julian Fellowes.

Working with Curtis this time around was: “A real opportunity for me to see a man who had professionally really matured and come into his own,” she fluffs up with pride and then she adds, deadpan, “Because to me, he had just become the guy that forgot to take out the garbage.”

Despite her success, McGovern says that, at 60, she feels restricted as an actress. “When you get to be my age, you either have a choice between the crazy woman who refused ever to become the perfect mother and wife and is now a neurotic, mostly alcoholic mess, or you play the nice perfect grandmother with hands folded in your lap.”

Her new theatrical endeavour, Ava, proves she is still getting parts that belie those two stereotypes, however. When I attend rehearsals, she is acting out the moment when, as a young 18-year-old ingenue visiting the MGM studios, the Forties screen siren met the first of her husbands-to-be: Mickey Rooney. Gardner was awkward and nervous, Rooney was besotted. Their whirlwind romance led to a divorce by the time Gardner was 21, famously saying that marrying him was the dumbest thing she ever did.

In the show, McGovern portrays Gardner mostly in the later years of her life after she suffered a stroke, but dips through key moments in her timeline, offering something of the “romantic love fantasy” that Gardner recreated time and again on screen.

Described as a femme fatale, Gardner was very open about her healthy libido. Was she too hot for Hollywood at the time? “She was slightly tortured about it because of the era in which she was raised, you simply weren’t allowed to like sex, and yet she did.”

McGovern was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1961. Her mother taught English in high school and her father moved the family to LA when she was young for a job teaching law at UCLA.

“My parents were unbelievably supportive and nonjudgmental, and I have come to appreciate that more as I have grown older. They were comfortable in their own eccentricities. That was the gift I got from them.”

Aged 19, in 1980, before she’d even graduated from New York’s Juilliard School, McGovern was cast in Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford, which she views as “a total fluke” – she was there at just the right time. She broke the news to her parents, saying: “I’m going to meet Robert Redford, and I’m probably gonna do this movie.” Redford turned out to be the perfect first director, with a “warm, reassuring presence.”

McGovern quickly became one of the most sought after actresses of the 80s and early 90s, playing Robert DeNiro’s love interest in Once Upon a Time in America in 1984, Brad Pitt’s girlfriend in The Favor in 1994 and Kevin Bacon’s pregnant partner in She’s Having a Baby in 1988. She racked up awards instantly, including a 1981 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Evelyn Nesbit in the film Ragtime. Did she identify with Gardner?

“I did very much so. I felt as though I had more of a right to try to interpret and tell her story than probably any other, and I did feel that I could bring elements of my own experience to it.”

Most Hollywood movies, as she sees it, “are very much a male gaze at a woman, and most of the time my job was to recreate some kind of version of it.

“First, it was the perfect girlfriend, then it became the perfect wife, then the perfect mother.”

McGovern says that she, like many of her generation, only became aware of sexism in the film industry as a result of the #MeToo movement. Although nothing directly happened to her, it made her reflect on her past life in Hollywood. “Listening to my own daughters, they have a different attitude and I feel like I’m learning from it and looking back on things that I used to accept without any questioning.

“My daughters see right through all the crap in a way that I wouldn’t have done at their age. I was more sort of looking for somebody to sweep me off my feet in a romantic way.”

I wonder if the romance refers to Sean Penn, to whom she was briefly engaged when she was 22. It’s a life that seems very different from her current one, married to Curtis and living in west London, still a big name but one who has won over the British public as opposed to being a Hollywood player.

“You get through all that and then you find a guy who is like your best friend,” she says. “If you’re really lucky.”

Ava: The Secret Conversations runs from January 14 to April 16 at Riverside Studios, London. Tickets: riversidestudios.co.uk. Downton Abbey: A New Era is out on March 18