The Times Magazine 27watched films. “Although living in LA, they
were as far away from showbusiness in their
brains as you can imagine.”
She loves LA, can never understand why
it’s considered an ugly, philistine city. “By 16,
I was driving a carpool, picking up a lot of
other kids on the way, an hour’s drive into
North Hollywood every day and back. And
my mother would just say, ‘Goodbye!’ Isn’t that
crazy? But that’s what everybody did. What
else can you do in LA?”
Elizabeth was just a bookish kid who loved
Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and John Denver
until she started acting in school plays. When
she appeared in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin
of our Teeth, an agent was in the audience. “She
left her number with the office administrator.
So I got in touch just after I graduated,
thinking maybe I’ll get a summer job.”
Instead, the agent took her on, sent her
to an open casting for Ordinary People, where
she won a major role. “I was 18 and Redford,
in retrospect, was one of the best directors
I ever worked with. I didn’t, of course, have
the perspective to understand that at the
time. He put everyone at ease, and made
them feel very comfortable.” Plus you had
the fearlessness of youth? “Of course!”
“That bit was easy,” she says of her early
career. “Times got challenging after that,
because it threw me into a strange position in
terms of friendships with people my age. I felt
suddenly on a different planet to them.” Early
stardom “robbed me of having that collegiate
experience, where a lot of people form
friendships for life, with people your own
age”. She didn’t enjoy 24/7 celebrity and
paparazzi interest in her when she dated
Sean Penn “which increased incrementally
whenever I was in his presence, and that was
part of why that life wasn’t right for me”.
Having turned down several major
blockbusters, which she won’t name – “But
no more than anybody. I’m not haunted by
that” – she went to New York, to return to
the stage. It was 1992 when at a party she met
Simon Curtis, whom for all his Englishness
she has described as “up-front and can-do and
expansive and funny”, while she, no American
cliché, is quieter and more reserved. When she
fell pregnant unexpectedly, they were forced
to pick a country and since Curtis had a job at
the BBC, they came to London.
It was an odd choice given McGovern’s
first trip with her parents, aged 15. “I walked
around London as a tourist with earphones on
with Joni Mitchell’s California in my ear, just
absolutely dying to get out of this grey, dismal
country. But now I think it’s the best city
to live in the world.” Yet people forget, she
says, how different London was in the early
Nineties: shabby, less cosmopolitan. Moreover
to have a movie career then required living in
Hollywood, under the industry’s nose, or you’dbe forgotten. “This was pre mobiles or emails
and even making a phone call to the United
States was so expensive, you thought really
hard before doing it.” An underrated sitcom,
Freezing, directed by Curtis, starring McGovern
as a US actress and a pre-Downton Hugh
Bonneville as her husband, finds humour in
her real-life dislocation.
Did she look wistfully at what was going
on in Hollywood? “Every now and then,” she
says. “But one of the things that I inherited
from my family, which I appreciate, is an
ability to create a sort of bubble in which
they live. My father didn’t feel he had to see
every movie that came out. My husband is the
opposite: he’s very keyed in. But like my father,
I found it easy to take a step back.”
But then she brings up the Sylvia Plath
biography, Red Comet, she’s just read. “It’s a
funny thing for women who have worked andbeen educated and led to believe that level of
stimulation is something that they expect in
life, and then suddenly to be at home with
young kids and think, ‘Oh, my God, I’m just
cleaning up the kitchen and changing nappies.
What has happened to me?’” she says.
She was shocked that Adlai Stevenson, who
gave the commencement speech at Plath’s
graduation from Smith College, “told all these
women who had worked so hard and were
such high achievers, ‘Your horizons will now
narrow.’ Those were his words of inspiration!
He basically said to them, ‘Make the most of
it. Support your husband.’
“And that’s the funny thing I never quite
figured out. You’re either giving your child to
somebody else to do what is often drudgery,
or you’re, ‘Oh, my God, I’m just cleaning up
the kitchen and changing nappies. What has
happened to me?’ ”
McGovern directed much of her own
maternal angst into music, forming the band
Sadie and the Hotheads, whose music flicks
between blues, country and soft rock. “God
made us out of the shifting sands,” she writes
in one song, “then left the rest for Mama’s
hands.” At first the band played to tiny venues
and mainly Downton fans who brought TV
merchandise for her to sign. Now, after some
festival success, the band is on hold, as one
member is ill.
Her daughter Grace, 23, is a teacher and
Mathilda, 28, is a writer who has just written
a BBC pilot, Dinosaur, about a young woman
on the autistic spectrum navigating life.
“It is a comedy, but it contains very serious
things.” They are tougher than her, she says,
more realistic. “It’s nothing to do with the
way I raised them. Except for maybe that
I didn’t overly protect them, because I just
was probably preoccupied with other things.
They would never put up with the kinds of
things about which I would have thought,
‘That’s just the way life is.’” Her daughters
will “give somebody a hard time for talking in
a patronising way to them, whereas I would
just totally accept that that was something
that happens. So that’s progress.”
After almost 30 years here – half her
life – does McGovern feel British? Her
accent certainly has an odd English inflection.
“My personality fits in naturally here, maybe
more than in America. I guess I still have that
American sense I was raised with that anything
is possible. Whereas in Britain – or at least a
clichéd idea of it – people are more at peace
with their lot in life. Coming here was difficult,
but then so many things that I wouldn’t have
predicted came out of it. And so in retrospect,
I’m really happy I took that leap. It felt like
the worst idea in the world at the time, but
now, I don’t regret it for one minute.” nDownton Abbey: A New Era is out on April 29She disliked paparazzi
interest, especially
when with Penn. ‘That
life wasn’t right for me’
With her husband Simon Curtis, who directed Downton
Abbey: A New Era, in New York in 2017Attending a film premiere with Sean Penn, March 1984GETTY IMAGES. HAIR: JOSH KNIGHT AT CAREN USING SAM MCKNIGHT. MAKE-UP: AMY WRIGHT AT CAREN USING WESTMAN ATELIER. ELIZABETH MCGOVERN WEARS BLAZER AND TROUSERS, BOTH RALPHLAUREN.CO.UK; SUNGLASSES, CUTLERANDGROSS.COM