ELIZABETH MCGOVERN:
Elizabeth McGovern is in her prime. She’s Downton’s lady of the manor, an accidental rock singer, mother of two and now the star of a movie she made happen. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing, she tells Juliet Rieden.
Lady Cora’s exciting new venture
It’s Elizabeth McGovern’s first time in Australia. The American-born London-based actress is fighting jetlag, but itching to explore, while also frantic to do everything she can to alert the world to her latest movie, The Chaperone. At 57, Elizabeth is the star of the show, which shouldn’t be a thing, but in an industry that extols fresh young faces and regularly shelves women over 40 to character roles, she’s right to feel empowered.
“I do feel there is a dearth of women my age represented in any field, in TV, movies and music,” Elizabeth says as she settles down to have her hair and make-up done in preparation for The Weekly’s exclusive photo shoot. “People
my age are out in the world and like to see themselves reflected in the stories they see, because we don’t just curl up and die after the age of 30 or 40.
“I yearn for it as an audience member. I don’t want to see every woman my age just as the supportive wife or the embittered singleton. I don’t want these clichés over and over again. I want to see people making discoveries, growing, learning and I feel, if I have an appetite for it, why wouldn’t other women? We deserve to be represented.”
Elizabeth is right, of course, and the tide is slowly turning, with beauty companies, advertising agencies and television networks all finally catching on and embracing women of substance, women aged between 40 and 100, who are frankly tired of being ignored.
In the case of The Chaperone, Elizabeth’s argument is also very much part of the film’s narrative. On the face of it, her character Norma should be a cipher, a dowdy lady in the background of the soon-to-be-famous and precociously vivacious Louise Brooks.
Although the piece is fictional, its screenplay drawn from the best-selling US novel of the same name by Laura Moriarty, it focuses on the real Louise Brooks, the rebellious 1920s dancer, film star and flapper icon, with her razorsharp bob and Jazz-Age glamour.
And yes, Louise – played by Haley Lu Richardson – is a big part
“I really like shaking it up a bit.”
of the film. But it is her chaperone, the quietly revolutionary Norma, played by Elizabeth, who leads, and the result is utterly fascinating.
“It has that thing that you look for in the kind of movie I like, which is wonderful characters set against an interesting period in history in which the characters are impacting history and history is impacting them in a way that has gravitas,” explains Elizabeth. “But it also touches on things that I felt were relevant today about women and what we have to give to one another and our relationship to our own sexuality.”
Beneath her demure exterior, Norma turns out to be pretty ballsy and, while the period costumes draw comparisons with the character Elizabeth is known best for – Lady Cora in Downton Abbey – the two are worlds apart.
“She doesn’t seem like a very extraordinary person on the surface, but the world is changed by people like Norma, who, under the radar, make things work for themselves in a way that seems to affect only those closest to them, but also slowly changes our culture,” says Elizabeth.
Norma was raised first by nuns in an orphanage and then by adoptive parents. She married comfortably and too young and always longed to find her birth mother. That meeting of mother and daughter is a turning point in the film, not just emotionally because it inspires Norma to grab hold of her life – and specifically her sex life – in a surprising and quite shocking way.
The movie is very much Elizabeth’s baby or “my fixation”, as she calls it.
She discovered the book when she was hired to voice its audio release and was smitten. She hastily took it to the best screenwriter she knew, Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, and he was impressed and got to work. Elizabeth worked with Julian for six seasons of the hit series and again recently on the upcoming Downton Abbey movie, but this latest collaboration was very different.
On Downton, Elizabeth had very little input beyond speaking her lines. She received her lines and waited for the “action” command. On The Chaperone, she was not only the leading lady but also a producer and very much part of the creative process. “I loved it,” she beams. “Just to be a grown up at the table having the discussions meant the world to me. I don’t know how it’s going to feel when I go back to just once again sitting in the make-up chair and getting dressed and being told what to say and do ... But for me, the whole experience has been a bit like how Norma felt. I feel very empowered by creating my own career.”
For someone who found immediate fame with her first job, this sounds rather incongruous, but Elizabeth confesses at the beginning she was never really in control. Spotted by a talent scout while acting in a school production at 17, going on 18, she was almost immediately cast in one of the biggest films of the 1980s, Robert Redford’s directorial debut, Ordinary People. The film won four Oscars and, before she knew it, Elizabeth McGovern had arrived.
Elizabeth was born in Illinois in the US Midwest and moved to Los Angeles when she was 10. Her father was a university professor and her mother a teacher. “My family is as far from the film business as you can possibly be,” she laughs.
Elizabeth had just completed a year at the famous Juilliard School for the performing arts in New York, when, bang, she was a star. “It was amazing,” says Elizabeth. “Robert Redford is one of the most extraordinary people. I didn’t understand how lucky I was. What a person to learn from! He was gentle, charming and thoughtful, and created a wonderful atmosphere, in which one felt very comfortable and not intimidated – which is so important for any performer to find their sweet spot.”
That “sweet spot” continued for close to a decade. Elizabeth was Oscar-nominated for her performance in Ragtime and a string of high-profile roles followed, including one opposite Hollywood hottie Sean Penn.
They dated on and off for two years and even got engaged. “I remember it being a combination of ecstatic and the opposite,” she says enigmatically, agreeing that it was never going to work. “We were a couple of kids. We were both 22 and 23, so I think it was just wonderfully dramatic and I still feel really a lot of affection for him, but I haven’t seen him in ages.”
After Elizabeth, Sean famously took up with Madonna, who became his wife. When asked if she remembers being upset losing Sean to the diva, Elizabeth laughs. “When they met, she wasn’t the Madonna that we think of now. She was just on the rise and
I was busy doing my thing and it felt right. There was no part of me that felt, ‘Oh, he is the one’. No, never.”
Elizabeth found her soulmate, British film director Simon Curtis, some
years later. They were working together in England on a TV play and the attraction was instant. “I felt absolutely at home with him, right from the start. We were just natural great friends. [Marrying Simon] was the best decision I ever made.”
They married in 1992 and Elizabeth fell pregnant pretty quickly with their first daughter Matilda.
“Since he had this permanent job and I couldn’t work anyway because I was pregnant, our lives began [and have remained] in England. That seemed like a crazy decision careerwise, but it felt like the right thing for us personally.”
England was “a slight shock to the system”, admits Elizabeth, laughing.
She always felt like the outsider, the American in the room “and I still do”, she adds. “America is a country built on an influx of various cultures, but England isn’t. It treasures its tradition and history, and quite rightly. Unlike America, when you’re there, if you’re not English you’re never going to be British, whereas if you’re not American to start with you’re going to be American eventually,” she explains.
Despite her huge Hollywood success, in London Elizabeth felt she had to build her career all over again from scratch. But first she devoted herself to raising their two daughters, Matilda and Grace, both now in their 20s.
Although she welcomed motherhood, Elizabeth found she had a lot of time on her hands, which is when she took up singing in a band under an alter ego, Sadie.
It all started with an innocent guitar lesson. “I thought it would be a fun thing to go back to the guitar that I had not played since I was 15,” she says. “There was a guy [Steve], who was advertising guitar lessons in the local paper. I called him up and it quickly became weekly song writing sessions. It took over my brain. I became obsessed with writing a song every week for Steve that he and I could play together.”
Elizabeth’s repertoire grew and two years later she found herself making an album with a bunch of musicians in the kitchen of Steve’s brother. “Then we needed to have a name, so I had this inspiration that I could create a character for myself that would give me courage to actually perform these songs publicly – I called that character Sadie. The guys were all very laid-back and shy, so I thought I’d give them a stage persona also and I called them the Hotheads. So we became Sadie and the Hotheads. We started performing these songs at open mikes and pubs, and it was really good for fun.”
Elizabeth says she was terrified at first, but slowly found her voice. At the same time, her acting career was back on the front foot with Downton Abbey. With her Downton fame speaking for her, Sadie and the Hotheads was picked up by a powerful music agent and soon they were performing at mainstream venues.
“We had amazing gigs like opening for Sting at the Montreux Jazz Festival. We toured with
Mike and the Mechanics.” To date,
Sadie and the Hotheads has cut four albums, the last under Elizabeth’s name.
What does Elizabeth’s family think of her being a rock star? She raises her eyebrows. “At first, my daughters were mostly totally embarrassed, but, I think, secretly proud. They came to some of the gigs and they quite liked the music. When I started, they could see I was not good at performing. I was very green. But they saw that I kept doing it and got better and better, and that was really interesting for them to see. Sometimes you have to work at something. It doesn’t necessarily happen overnight. They could watch that whole process.”
Elizabeth is certainly a role model for women of all ages. Sadie aside, this year is turning out to be huge for her. When she returns from opening The Chaperone around the globe, she starts a 13-week West End theatre run in The Starry Messenger, opposite Matthew Broderick. She is also part of an eight-part TV adaptation of War of the Worlds with Gabriel Byrne and later in the year the movie version of Downton Abbey comes out.
Theatre, TV, film and singing live. “I really like shaking it up a bit,” she says as she shimmies into a satin pants suit for our shoot.
A woman of substance, indeed.
The Chaperone is in cinemas now.