Downton star leads double life
Mcgovern juggles role as aristocrat with job as singer
It has been a long and winding road, but Elizabeth McGovern has finally made it. After an Oscar nomination at the age of 20, a starring role opposite Robert De Niro at 23, and a little-known television drama called Downton Abbey, the U.S. actress has landed the big one: a live appearance in Barnstaple. That’s Barnstaple, Devon. At a venue called The Factory. On the Roundswell Industrial Estate. Oh, the glamour.
This is what happens when, in the midst of a long and successful acting career, you discover that you were, all along, a singer-songwriter, with a desperate need to play obscure venues in provincial backwaters, and in deep midwinter, too.
“It was around 2001 or 2003 when my kids were quite small and I was at home a lot and started writing songs and singing,” she remembers. “It just took over my brain.”
McGovern, who plays Cora, Countess Grantham in Julian Fellowes’s aristo-soap, doesn’t have to subject herself to hours in a minivan.
At 51, her career is enjoying a fruitful renaissance after two decades of domesticity, during which, acting took second place to the raising of her two daughters. Yet, despite Downton’s success on both sides of the Atlantic, the music thing nags at her.
“I was playing the guitar as a private hobby and I thought I’d get some lessons to improve my technique,” she says. “And I saw an advert in a local newspaper, ‘Guitar lessons by Steve’ — that’s Steve Nelson — and instead of having lessons we just started bashing song ideas around, because he is a songwriter himself. I became addicted.”
So there she is, in the alter ego of Sadie, looking as un-Cora-like as possible, fronting the Hotheads, a bunch of mellow, greying musicians, ironically named. There is a wistful quality to the songs, reflections on mid-life and the mundane, delivered in a voice charming in its imperfection.
“They aren’t dripping with sentiment. The love they address is the kind you have for the person you raise kids with — ‘We started out on a romantic beach, and now I’m doing your laundry.’ ”
The man for whom McGovern does the laundry is the film and TV director Simon Curtis, her husband of 20 years.
On meeting him, she felt naturally at home with the Englishman and the relationship blossomed. The discovery that she was pregnant changed her life. Bidding farewell to New York and Holly- wood, she headed to Britain with Curtis and a new, rather less glamorous, existence in Chiswick.
The former girlfriend of Sean Penn, nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Ragtime, who co-starred with Robert De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America, found herself changing diapers in leafy west London.
“Having children didn’t erase ambition, but it put things into a different perspective,” she says. “It gave me something far more powerful than my feelings for myself and my career.”
In Downton, she plays another American transplanted to the old country. Cora is a typical “Buccaneer,” the name given to American heiresses, daughters of selfmade men, packed off to England in search of aristocratic matches.
McGovern fought for the part. Downton, she says, allows viewers to take a warm bath in the alleged certainties of the past.
Simon is supportive of her musical venture, which has so far resulted in two CDs, after initial concerns about the sounds emanating from his wife’s practice sessions.
“It was painful for him at the beginning, a bit excruciating having to see me go through those stages of just not being very good. It’s very hard for me to accept my voice the way it is. I want it to be Barbra Streisand or Mariah Carey and it’s not. But I’ve worked hard. I’ve taken myself from hopeless to OK.”