Elizabeth McGovern On Final Time As Lady Cora, And Playing Ava Gardner

EXCLUSIVE: Elizabeth McGovern is fired up when she talks about sensuous silver screen goddess Ava Gardner, whom the Downton Abbey star portrays in a stage show that hits New York next week. Gardner, she argues, endured the “objectification of the female body, which is the basis of the entire movie business.”

Being a movie star in the 1940s, 1950s and into the ’60s took its toll on Gardner, who escaped her mink-lined cage in California to spend her final years in England residing in a grand apartment close to Harrods’ department store. 

Ava: The Secret Conversations, beginning at New York’s City Center on July 29, is based on a series of tapes the writer Peter Evans recorded with the one-time screen siren in London over a four-year period beginning in 1988 which he then had published in 2013, more than two decades after Gardner’s death in 1990. 

The show moves to Chicago’s Studebaker Theater from September 24-October 12, after which it will transfer to Toronto’s CAA Theatre, scheduled for November 5-23.

McGovern also adapted the book, turning it into a play that’s one of the most candid, up-close-and-personal chronicles of a career in Hollywood. It’s like a ferocious Wimbledon tennis final as the characters of Gardner and Evans fire off verbal volleys about the woman born in Grabtown, NC, in 1922, who went on to be billed as one of Hollywood’s most potent femme fatales. She married Mickey Rooney, Arnie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, but in the play Gardner is not defined by the men in her life; she’s big enough in her own right to take top billing. 

Ava: The Secret Conversations — it shares the same title as the Evans book — was first staged at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, West London three years ago with Moritz von Stuelpnagel directing. McGovern, in association with producer Karl Sydow, took the show to the Geffen Playhouse for its U.S. premiere in spring 2023. Aaron Costa Ganis plays Evans.

McGovern says that the more she plays Ava the more she “loves” and understands her. “The reason I do and I think audiences do, is that she’s an absolutely authentic personality,” she says. “She came from nothing … and just had her head screwed on right about a lot of things way ahead of her time.”

Gardner had guts and McGovern in her portrait of the star puts that across in spades.

Don’t mistake McGovern for the seemingly demure Lady Cora, chatelaine of Downton Abbey, the role she plays in the show created by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park, The Gilded Age). The latest film, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, will be released in theaters through Focus Features on September 12. It’s directed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn, Downton Abbey: A New Era, Cranford), her British filmmaker husband with whom she has two daughters. 

As McGovern sipped her green tea, I was idly curious about why she’d stopped drinking coffee. I remember noticing at a breakfast event a while back that she downed copious cups of the stuff.

 Suddenly, her head jerks and her eyes widen. 

“Oh no. I’ve had three cups already,” she roars.

Taking in my look of incredulity, she growls, ”Oh yeah, that’s getting me out of bed, baby!”

Three coffees with a little milk does the trick, she trills with a wicked twinkle. ”But that’s before I say my first word.”

The coffee interlude is a beautifully executed vignette that serves to remind one that McGovern has been a star since Robert Redford cast her opposite Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland and Timothy Hutton in 1980s Oscar-winning Ordinary People.

Following that with Milos Forman’s version of E.L Doctorow’s Ragtime gave McGovern, now 64, a last gasp of old Hollywood in that the movie also starred Bessie Love, a legend of the silent and talking picture eras, and James Cagney, a name that will be forever etched on celluloid. To follow that with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America opposite Robert De Niro and James Woods was exciting to one who has watched her career from afar.

“We’ve lost something,” she allows ruefully as we chat about those movies from the 1980s. “It’s the most incredible thing to look back at those great movies that were made.”

She feels less enamored with the way the business is set up now. “First of all, everything being a series that has to go on forever makes me personally absolutely crazy. Except people say, ‘Oh, this gets good in three years.’ “

Also, she thinks “that template of movies that really explored the human spirit, the genuine human spirit, and then projected it beautifully … that’s gone. I miss it. And now I realize that particularly the ’70s, maybe to a slightly lesser extent the ’80s, that was the end of it all. Not that there aren’t good movies now.”

There’s just something so unusual about Leone’s flawed 1984 classic, McGovern says.

“It’s truly a vision. You could fault it in a lot of ways, but that is one person’s vision, and it actually was given manifestation. And now everything is so much by committee,” she says mournfully.

Where’s the “idiosyncratic thing that’s arresting because it’s somebody’s amazing imagination?,” she demands.

Instead, she asserts, “you’re having somebody constantly overseeing and ticking boxes … then suddenly it’s like everything becomes part of this bland continuum.”

McGovern pauses to acknowledge that she’s seen “some great things recently, so it’s not like it doesn’t happen.” She offers a salute to Sean Baker’s Oscar winner Anora and the FX miniseries Dying for Sex starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate, which she calls “extraordinary.”

We wonder how many of today’s movies will be remembered in decades to come as we both marvel over Gardner’s roles in pictures such as Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, John Ford’s Mogambo, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa, Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May and John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana.

“That movie business has gone,” she laments.

Her experience of “the machine” was very different from Gardner’s. She didn’t allow it to consume her the way the business did Gardner.

McGovern suggests in the play that being a movie star, a tempestuous one at that, took its toll on Gardner, certainly in her personal life. And yet, McGovern says admiringly, ”she never let it turn her into a victim of any kind. She still had her kind of way of being her own person, sort of taking responsibility for her own choices.”

The Hollywood “machine” can be destructive to people, especially women, in the way they’re often treated, like in the way they’re objectified. 

McGovern considers the point while making a more pertinent one of her own. “Well, yeah, the objectification of the female body,” she says, ”well that’s the basis of the entire movie business. And I think that now we do have a way of talking about things … there’s now a dialogue that can be had, and I think that’s huge. I don’t think that means that things changed overnight but I think in Ava Gardner’s day, there just simply weren’t the words to express” the misogyny that continues to be rampant.

“And yet what it [Hollywood] offers is so seductive that you can’t help but want that bit of it, the money and the seeming security of it. And I think the stuff that you grapple with when you’re in that situation, it’s so hard to actually identify and recognize. There weren’t any words for it in her day. So that’s progress,” she theorizes.

“It didn’t even occur to her that there was anything wrong with [the lecherous behavior]. I mean, literally, it just seemed so intrinsic to life that she knew, it didn’t even occur to her that there could be another option. So that’s interesting to look at from this distance,” McGovern adds.

In some ways, McGovern thinks it’s useful to take that look back.

”I feel like there was no putting yourself in the role of victim. … Now, I think there’s a lot of tendency to self victimize, which has been very useful,” she says. “But I think now personally, it’s time for women to say, ‘Okay, we did that. We embraced that,’ and now it’s time to say, ‘Well, we are on our own sexual journeys as well.’ And to own that part of it, that it’s not all a sexual interaction, that we’re not learning from participating in to a certain level for our own sexual growth. And I don’t think we’ve quite gotten there, if that makes any sense?”

There’s a bit in the play that McGovern particularly loves doing, that perhaps sums up Gardner’s attitude to all the Hollywood shenanigans, “where she just says ‘I f*cking love sex.’ ”

McGovern continues: “And I think that was a kind of unusual position for a woman in that era.”

She points out: “You weren’t supposed to love sex. You weren’t supposed to love being free and having a lot of lovers. You weren’t supposed to have lots of different experiences. And I think there was an ambivalence in her mind about it because she wasn’t a product of her time.”

I suggest that a video of her play should be screened in drama schools because what’s discussed in Ava: The Secret Conversations amounts to world-class advice from someone who lived through an age of wanton misogyny and sexism that, as events in recent years have shown, hasn’t gone away.

And yes, there’s nostalgia in seeing Gardner’s life laid bare in 90 minutes — images of the legend are beamed onto a screen during the show like moments in time frozen forever. Part of the joy of doing research for the play was watching and rewatching Gardner’s movies, McGovern tells me.

As we, the audience, watching Ava: The Secret Conversation, take in the glamorous Ava Gardner image beamed on a screen, onstage walks the real person as portrayed by McGovern. “The human being, old, post-stroke, cranky, trying to get on with her life. And that’s that juxtaposition that is really theatrically interesting. And this screen hangs over her head. She can’t just get on with her life in a way that my grandmother can, sort of quietly,” she tells me.

We don’t ever say male stars are old. We rarely say that Harrison Ford is old. We almost never write that George Clooney’s old. Or that Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are. McGovern remarks that it’s so deep in our psyche. That idea, she notes, “of being a woman, being sexy or attractive, is so deeply sort of poisoned by society and all the insidious messaging that we constantly get, it’s a really hard nut to crack.”

McGovern sighs and wonders why we “feel shame about age?” And asks: “Why are we doing that to ourselves? It’s wrong. I feel for my daughters, it’s important that they see a woman who is not ashamed of being old. It’s like, bring it on. Let’s run with this. So that inspires me. I want to create a situation where they feel that there’s something ahead for them besides trying to be young all the time.”

She shakes her head worrying at the idea of young women having to consider altering their bodies in order to conform in some societal beauty stakes. “What does that say?”

Maggie Smith used comment on going to Los Angeles and seeing all those faces that do not move and McGovern admits she has made similar observations.

Roaring with laughter, she adds, “I mean, they also a lot of times, look good. So it’s not like I don’t get it. But I do feel like if I have a job to do, it’s to make people feel like they can look forward to becoming old as women.”

Stroking her greying tresses, she adds: “I don’t see why not.”

Rewatching the original 2010 episodes of Downton Abbey it’s easy to see why we became hooked. For starters, class is an eternally popular topic ,plus the show was physically beautiful: the costumes, the house, the cast. And we adored the display of manners, the good and the bad, plus all the upstairs and downstairs goings-on. 

Hugh Bonneville’s Robert Crawley, sorry, the Earl of Grantham, was head of house but it soon became clear that it was run by Jim Carter’s Carson under the gentle guidance of McGovern’s American-born Countess of Grantham. The show’s underpinned by the differences in character and country of Lady Cora and her formidable mother-in-law, the dowager Countess Violet Crawley, played by the equally formidable and much missed Dame Maggie Smith.

Smiling, McGovern remarks that she was never sure “whether it was ever clear” that Cora was an heiress from the former colony across the pond.

“She could separate herself from the preoccupations of that English obsession with hierarchy and the way things are done. I was never sure whether that was actually clear or whether it was just in my own head,” she laughs.

I wondered whether any of Cora’s retorts were ever ad-libbed? Laughing, McGovern says, “Well, until this movie, I’m telling you, no word was ever ad-libbed.”

Leaning forward, somewhat conspiratorially, she tells me: ”I’m not sure if the people that were shooting it ever quite realized it, but I was thinking, ‘What is this bullsh*t?’ But I wasn’t sure whether anybody could see that or not. The only thing that we ever, ever started to slightly become slightly looser was in this final movie … because most of the time, there was an absolute rule that not one syllable could ever be ever changed, which in a way gives it its distinctive flavor. And so I always completely never objected. I always thought that was how we keep that special feeling about it.”

She clarifies that her “this is bullsh*t” comment pertained to “just the sort of the obsession with the English way of doing things” in the scripts and not to her experience on the series and its subsequent films.

“Cora literally does not understand the social codes, which is a bit how I feel actually. I mean, even now to this day with Simon and his family, the way they do things, and I’ll think, why?” she shrugs.

While Smith is missed enormously, McGovern says that it didn’t feel “like the bottom’s dropped out of it, which is what I was worried you’d feel without her, because she’s really there.”

Dame Maggie’s absence allowed exploration in different directions. For instance, McGovern says the production wasn’t stopping for a setup set piece for Dame Maggie, “which delighted audiences and I love, but I think it gives it sort of wings in a way … It allows it to sort of fly on its own.”

Softly, she adds: “But she’s there. She’s permeates everything, definitely.”

However much Smith shone in Downton Abbey, she was surrounded by a gold-plated core company of actors that includes Dockery, Bonneville, Carter, Laura Carmichael, Joanne Froggatt, Phyllis Logan, Allen Leech, Penelope Wilton and more.

Larks were had on set with all of them, McGovern says. “We all had giggles all the time about everything,” she says.

“For some of them, it was one of their first jobs. And then we watch them blossom and get married and have kids. You can’t help but feel a real attachment.”

In between screen and stage work, the actress enjoys songwriting with her band Sadie & the Hotheads. Their latest new album, out now, is Let’s Stop Fighting. “It’s a let’s all get along kind of thing,” she jests.

The album of nine songs for which she penned the lyrics and co-wrote a lot of the music has a mellow, soothing vibe about it. Indeed, she calls it “very gentle” and it’s from a perspective “of someone who has been there and back a little bit.”

There’s a chance she and Sadie & the Hotheads will find time to go on the road next year.

Another project is a screenplay based on a British novel that she’s reluctant to name because final rights for the tome are still being negotiated. 

There’s this “fantastic older woman character, once again” who she will play. The character has two daughters. “They’re in the 1960s coming together for a family weekend in the country, and in different ways, they’re all negotiating their sexual romantic lives,” she explains.

And, heck, the writing exercise gives her a role to play. “Exactly. No one else is going to, right?”

Before McGovern scoots away, I ask if it’s really the final farewell for Downton Abbey?

“It is, definitely. I can tell you that … unless they do something like they go back in time and it’s a different cast. You know, the young Maggie. There’s been quite a lot of that sort of talk. 

“Can’t wait to sit back and kick my heels up and see it,” McGovern says with a radiant smile.