The Times Magazine 25or a reminder of how Hollywood
has changed, watch the 1982 Oscar
ceremony for best supporting actress
on YouTube. The nominees are read
out: “Melinda Dillon for Absence of
Malice; Jane Fonda, On Golden Pond;
Joan Hackett, Only When I Laugh...”
Each woman smiles graciously, until
“Elizabeth McGovern, Ragtime...”
when the camera frantically scours
the audience then gives up. The Oscar goes
to Maureen Stapleton for Reds.
Where were you, I ask Elizabeth McGovern.
She was 21 back then, and her debut movie,
Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford,
had won four Academy awards the previous
year. It is inconceivable now that a beautiful
starlet, raven-haired with those serious cobalt
eyes, Oscar-nominated for her second film,
wouldn’t show up.
McGovern smiles. “I was working on
something else,” she says. Did she regret not
going? “No, not at all. I didn’t expect to win.
I didn’t think I should win.” These days, a
production would shut down to let a nominee
fly off to Los Angeles. But filming Lovesick
with director Marshall Brickman, she watched
the Oscars with the cast at his apartment.
“Times were different then.”
The next year, when McGovern was invited
to present an Oscar, “I went shopping at
Debenhams with my mother for the dress.
Now it’s crazy. It would all be stylists, people
dressing you, all the blah, blah, blah.”
Not to mention this year’s drama of
Will Smith slapping comedian Chris Rock.
As a member of the Academy, what did she
think? Her words are careful: “I just thought,
‘No, please, no. This is not right.’” Can
she elaborate? (A few days later she tweets:
“Something tells me that Jada [Smith’s
wife] is capable of standing up for herself
#teamChrisRock”.) “I do have views. I don’t
know if I want to get involved. There are
just so many elements to that whole thing in
America that have to do with other issues...”
Culture wars? “Oh yes.”
After her Oscar nomination, McGovern
enjoyed a few more gilded years as love
interest for major stars. Opposite Robert De
Niro in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in
America, as a woman who cheats on Brad Pitt
in The Favor and with Sean Penn – to whom
she was briefly engaged – in Racing with
the Moon. It is always seen as a comedown
that she ended up in England, most famous
for playing Cora, the Countess of Grantham,
in Downton Abbey. Yet at 60, she is not only
at peace with the Hollywood career she
might have had, but thinks her life worked
out happier here.
We meet to discuss the second Downton
movie, A New Era, an escapist romp in which
the stately home is rented out as a movie setand the Crawleys head to the French Riviera
to investigate the racy past of the dowager
countess (Maggie Smith). Not only was
McGovern reunited with the cast she’s worked
with for six series, but the film was directed
by her husband, Simon Curtis, best known
for My Week with Marilyn. Was this awkward?
Did she fear colleagues saw her as teacher’s
pet? McGovern loyally says she was proud
of how Curtis negotiated commanding a
long-established cast. But, anyway, she notes
wistfully, “I don’t at all carry any kind of
weight in that show.”
I’ve always thought Downton failed to mine
a potentially rich dramatic seam: the culture
clash between Cora (an American heiress)
and the English aristocratic dynasty who
needed her fortune. Hundreds of “dollar
princesses” such as Jennie Jerome, who
married Randolph Churchill, traded cash
for kudos, but then found grand English
houses dark and draughty compared with
more modern American homes. Yet Cora is
effortlessly gracious and mainly happy with
her lot. “Yes, I always hoped we would explore
that aspect of her life more than we ever did,
because it’s potentially very interesting,” says
McGovern. “It was very challenging for those
women. Henry James, Edith Wharton, they’re
obsessed by this. But it wasn’t anything that
Julian [Fellowes, Downton’s creator/writer] or
the executives were interested in.”
McGovern is an actress who’s lately striven
to do more than speak others’ words. She took
The Chaperone, a book about the silent star
Louise Brooks, to Fellowes, who turned it into
a film; McGovern produced and starred. And
she has just finished a London run in a play
she wrote, Ava: the Secret Conversations, based
upon frank interviews between Ava Gardner
and her would-be biographer.
“You think, what is the second act for a
woman who’s been desired, has been held
up as beautiful? And it’s usually the crack-up
and the alcoholic; that’s the cliché. Whereas
Ava was a very intelligent, witty, self-effacing,
interesting human being. She was tough.”
As for McGovern’s own second act, “I’m just
happy still to be standing.”
Raised in Illinois, her mother was a high
school teacher and her father a law professor
at Northwestern University, who when
Elizabeth was about nine made the “whimsical
decision” to take a year-long job in Los
Angeles, then, because they loved outdoor life,
stayed. “My family was eccentric, academic.
Big readers, big lovers of the arts without
being artists. Kind, gentle people.”
Her paternal grandfather, William
Montgomery McGovern, was an adventurer,
war correspondent and anthropologist, cited
as a possible inspiration for Indiana Jones: “He
was quite a character, but he died when I was
very young.” Her family, she says, neverF
‘I went to Debenhams
with my mother for my
first Oscars dress. Now
it would all be stylists’
With Laura Carmichael in Downton Abbey: A New EraFrom top: on the set of 1980’s Ordinary People with
director Robert Redford and Timothy Hutton; co-starring
with Brad Pitt in the 1994 rom-com The Favor
ALAMY