For the past 16 years, Elizabeth McGovern’s signature role has been Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, in “Downton Abbey” — a character known for her preternatural calm and ladylike composure.
So it’s been quite a change of pace for McGovern to let loose in her play “Ava: The Secret Conversations” (at New York City Center through Sept. 14), in which she portrays a sultry bombshell who speaks her mind, drops F-bombs and is not shy about enjoying sex.
“Oh, it’s been nice, it’s been fun,” McGovern said. “It’s very liberating to take off that psychological corset, for sure.”
The Ava in question is Ava Gardner, a sensual, classically beautiful brunette who held a prime spot in the Hollywood starry firmament of the 1950s and ’60s. Her best-known films include “Mogambo,” “The Barefoot Contessa” and “The Night of the Iguana,” and she had tumultuous, headline-grabbing marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, as well as complicated entanglements with the notoriously eccentric Howard Hughes and George C. Scott, both of whom she described as abusive.
This makes for a tantalizing subject, especially since Gardner had a sardonic wit. But “Ava,” which opens on Thursday, is not the kind of bio-show that could be mistaken for an interstitial segment on TCM. Rather, McGovern adapted the British journalist Peter Evans’s decidedly nontraditional book “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” to explore the tension between writer and subject, and how a celebrity’s life is shaped for public consumption.
“In most biographies, there is the personality of the biographer very much in every page, but in this incarnation, we’ve got the biographer actually sitting there,” McGovern said in a recent interview following a rehearsal in Manhattan. “And of course that informs the way the life story is revealed, because the biographer has a personality and an investment in the subject and the story.”
The book’s roots go back to 1988, when Gardner, living in London and recovering from a stroke, asked Evans (portrayed by Aaron Costa Ganis in the show) to help her write her memoirs. Their long chats sometimes occurred in the dead of night, when Gardner could not sleep and called Evans on the phone. But when she felt the narrative was escaping her, she fired him. Her sanitized “Ava: My Story” came out in 1990 — the year of her death, at 67. Eventually, Evans got the authorization to use his notes and tapes, and his own account was published (posthumously) in 2013.
Initially, McGovern was drawn less to Gardner herself than to Evans’s book. “This idea so intrigued me of looking at the process of writing the autobiography, rather than seeing just yet another life story of ‘woman goes to Hollywood,’ [and] the fallout — we’ve seen that a million times before,” she said.
For the director Moritz von Stuelpnagel, the play looks at “the question of what we do with our women celebrities, whether their career is the product of exploitation or whether they should be reviewed as having been able to exploit the system.”
The show’s dramatic engine is the cat-and-mouse game between Evans and Gardner, reflecting the book’s prickly exchanges when he tries to suss out juicy tidbits and she swerves between obfuscation and candor — there is a particularly funny quip about Sinatra’s endowment. “You basically see these two people who are desperately trying to create this piece together, and they’re just so desperately mismatched,” said Costa Ganis, who, in addition to portraying Evans, brings to life Gardner’s husbands.
Still, as fascinating as its narrative device is, the play is anchored by Gardner’s indomitable individuality. “I have absolutely loved rediscovering the force of that personality, just the fact that she was a woman ahead of her time without ever having a self-consciousness about it,” McGovern said. “She was incredibly progressive. She was a feminist in the sense that she just lived life the way she saw it.”
McGovern felt she could draw on her own experiences, for there were similarities between the two of them: Gardner, who grew up in North Carolina, landed at MGM at 18, bound by a seven-year contract, while McGovern made her film debut in her teens, in Robert Redford’s acclaimed “Ordinary People” (1980). “I’ve had my own experience of the machine they call the movie business,” McGovern said. “That gave me a lot of confidence in making up the bits that I made up.” (Her play expands on Evans’s book with additional details.)
That attitude also likely helped McGovern trust her ability to pull off the writing part. The actress, 64, who is married to the director Simon Curtis and has lived in Britain for three decades, started putting pen to paper — or finger to keyboard — by developing material for her Americana-style band Sadie and the Hotheads. When the writers originally commissioned to adapt Evans’s book into a play did not deliver, McGovern thought, “How hard can this be?” and pulled up her sleeves. The resulting play premiered at Riverside Studios in London in 2022, and had a run at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles the following year; it is scheduled to travel to Chicago and Toronto after the New York City engagement.
Since then, McGovern has returned for another go-round with Lady Cora: After six seasons and two movies, a third feature film, “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” (directed by her husband), is hitting theaters on Sept. 12. If it’s the last we hear from the long-running franchise, that’ll be fine with McGovern — but not because she’s tired of it.
“This movie in some ways for me is the most resonant of them all, and I wasn’t expecting that because it’s not a script that has ambitions to do too much except continue the relationships for the fans, really,” she said with Gardner-esque forthrightness. “But I think because of that it succeeds more than the other films, and for me more than a lot of the series, because it’s sort of relaxed in itself and the characters are just allowed to interact in the way that everybody loves.”
McGovern is about a year younger than Gardner was at the time of her initial conversation with Evans, but the landscape and options for women have changed considerably in the past decades, even in a field as fraught as acting. When Gardner reached out to Evans, she wanted to write a book not just because she needed money but perhaps also because she was painfully aware of her place in the movie business — “actors get older, actresses get old,” she told him.
McGovern, on the other hand, appears unfazed. “It’s not something that, particularly at this moment, I’m struggling with, to be honest,“ she said of aging. “Like a lot of people I know, I see a picture of myself and I literally think, ‘Who the hell is it? What’s my mother doing?’” She laughed. “But for whatever reason, I feel more alive now in terms of my creative energy than I ever have.”
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