Elizabeth McGovern Is a Powerhouse on Both Stage and Screen

Elizabeth McGovern, a Juilliard graduate with Oscar and Emmy nominations, had never seen an Ava Gardner movie until a few years ago, when she found a copy of the Golden Age star’s biography on her shelf. It’s the kind of thing he would buy, she thought of her husband, and started in on Peter Evans’s 2013 book, based on a series of interviews the journalist held with Gardner in the late eighties, before the actress fired him and withdrew her rights. But though McGovern saw parts of herself in Gardner—long Hollywood career, a dispiriting premium on looks, an eventual resettling in London—it was the fact of the conversations themselves that drew her in. By 2022, she was playing the legend onstage in Ava: The Secret Conversations, the two-hander McGovern wrote, titled after Evans’s book, which is currently in performances in New York.

“I’m not an obsessive reader of the genre, but this one is distinctive because the character of the writer himself is portrayed,” the American actor says. “Most of the time, you’re reading a biography and the writer and their tastes are disguised, but here he was right there, since it is literally the transcripts. Immediately, I thought it would be a good idea to put the biographer and their subject together in a room and watch that play out as they struggle to be the one that dictates the story of this person’s life.”

McGovern speaks with a refreshing candidness when discussing Gardner, or their shared industry. Having spent decades in the business, her clarity on the whole of it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it is striking (to a journalist, at least) that what drew her to adapt Evans’s book was its lack of claim towards objectivity, with each side given its fair shake. McGovern’s conversation has a friendly professorial air, sometimes alluringly conspiratorial, and she was eager to continue working through the ideas she’d set in motion through the play, which she penned after a failed start with hired writers. There’s no thinly veiled anger at showbiz—and if there’s a hidden resentment toward media gossip, I didn’t catch it—but rather the sense that her observations are quietly girded by an instinctive connection to Gardner.

Lately known for her leading role in the Downton Abbey franchise, which began on television in 2010 and concludes this month with its third film, it took less than a year into McGovern’s studies at Juilliard for Robert Redford to cast her in 1980’s Ordinary People. A year later, she earned an Academy Award nomination for Miloš Forman’s Ragtime. The Illinois native didn’t grow up a movie obsessive—though “the ones that I loved, I absolutely loved”—and she misses the communal experience of cinemagoing. The demise of that ritual is part of what has recently been pushing her back towards theater, which holds more tightly to that tenet.

Curiously, in what may well be her first-ever interview, assessing her sudden rise for The New York Times in 1981, McGovern told the reporter that she foresaw herself opting to act mainly in small theatrical productions: “I think it’s important to do stage acting, because you’re allowed to do roles you wouldn’t necessarily be right for in film, and you’re allowed to do things that aren’t indelibly imprinted for all time—so you can be bad. That’s how you learn.”

The word bad cannot be used to describe McGovern’s performance as Gardner. She taps into both the real woman’s late-in-life grandeur and the acting style of her high period, and fills that narrow, imperceptible gap with the brokenness of someone left to exist between those two states. She says one of her hopes for the play, which is interspersed with montages of classic Gardner films and set to a sweeping score, is that it serves as an homage to Hollywood glamour, to “those beautiful movies that were one story, in one night, told in a grand and ambitious way.” Not just the films themselves, but “the whole idea of movies,” she says, is dying a slow death. McGovern was reminded of this when the show’s publicity team invited a few influencers to a performance: “young kids on TikTok, you know.”

“I just got the impression movies are not a part of their worldview in the same way, at all,” she says, her warm smile forgiving their cultural trespass. “Even though, in many ways, the play looks critically at the business that created these movies, I hope it’s full of affection for the art form. It’s a double-handed thing, because the business was quite destructive to the characters that it promoted, like Ava, but it did create some absolutely wonderful stories and images, and a whole ethos that people would live their lives by, which has disappeared. I mean, it created the whole idea, or reinforced it, really, of romantic love. That’s something else that I both love and hate about the whole thing.”

“Not everything that’s lost is positive,” is McGovern’s reply when I ask about mourning that era, adding that another of her ambitions is for the audience to leave with a visceral understanding of the psychic damage caused “by being part of that machine.” Gardner toys with the Evans character throughout the play, alternately coming onto and dismissing him. Whatever personal salvation she might have sought in their relationship, the book’s eventual shaky publication reminds us, did not pan out. McGovern says putting yourself in the position of being famous, “particularly for being sexy or the embodiment of someone’s romantic fantasy,” renders intimate relationships almost impossible. (She herself has been married to the English director Simon Curtis since 1991.)

Still, the style of Gardner’s films—Mogambo and The Killers are McGovern’s favorites—is something she’s come to fully appreciate now that it’s disappearing. She finds those two-hour journeys genuinely nourishing, in contrast to her frustration with our fractured monoculture; distracting, competing storytelling, or “this whole thing that is very zeitgeist, which are the series people say will only get good in two years.” But from an acting standpoint, McGovern recognizes the value in improving across time, and is grateful that the play, which premiered in London in 2022, has had a year or two between each iteration so that everyone can digest the experience. After a switch in directors, the production made its North American debut in Los Angeles in 2023, and will go on to Chicago and Toronto once its off-Broadway run concludes.

“Having been in a long series, I can attest to the fact that you inevitably have to do scripts that you simply don’t have time to hone in that way, that you just throw it out there,” she says. “There’s an energy to that, and there’s an amazing thing about having a story that goes into somebody’s home over the course of a long, long time. But what I love is the chance to hone it, to tighten, sharpen, and there’s no shortcut to that. Every single time, I feel like it’s gotten closer to my dream of it, and it does take that amount of time.”

The actor says she’s not the type to formally come up with elaborate character backstories, but honing Gardner came to McGovern by physically acting out scenes before putting pen to paper. She credits her experience writing music for her band, Sadie and the Hotheads, which she formed in 2007, with giving her the confidence to extend her ear’s natural musicality into playwriting. Gardner’s life, which the play sometimes portrays via flashbacks, provided McGovern a wealth of inspiration, and the challenge of writing, she supposes, “is deciding what to leave out.” But she opted not to dwell on some of the sadder aspects of the star’s life, like the extent of her persistent alcoholism. “That’s also such a story we’ve seen before.”

Two invested admirers of the resulting work made themselves known to McGovern early on, when Gardner’s niece and grandniece, both named Ava, met her at the London theater where it premiered. (Including Gardner’s namesake aunt, there are now five Avas in the lineage.) Their support, especially considering her not-entirely-flattering portrayal, encouraged her to continue attempting to capture the contradictions, and writing has further worked its way into McGovern’s mind.

“I mean, I don’t have any delusions about…,” she cuts herself off and smiles. “I have written a screenplay, which I’m really excited to do, but I think it’s quite a difficult time to get movies made. The movie business is really, really struggling. But I still am kind of hoping that I can. I think I feel that my gift is more adapting material, or that’s how I feel right now. I’m not actively on the hunt for material, just because I’m busy doing this, frankly. But I would like to do more.”

Ava: The Secret Conversations is playing at New York City Center through September 14. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale will be in theaters September 12.