Britain Now Her Cup of Tea: Elizabeth McGovern Profile
LONDON - The woman in the London cafe looked familiar, like a friend from long ago.
In a way, she was: So vivid and achingly believable were Elizabeth McGovern's performances in films such as Ordinary People (1980), Ragtime (1981) and Racing With the Moon (1984) that she became part of the fabric of adolescence for a generation of U.S. moviegoers.
Precocious and lovely, briefly engaged to Sean Penn in his pre-Madonna period, McGovern seemed destined for a career of red carpets and big-budget films. But after some less-memorable movies and a detour into New York regional theater, she moved to London to marry an Englishman, TV producer Simon Curtis; they now have two daughters. Although she has appeared in plays, movies and TV dramas through the years, she has done so quietly.
In the fall, McGovern suddenly found herself in a hit British TV show: Downton Abbey, a lavish costume drama set in a grand English country house just before World War I. In the series - the first episode to be seen in the United States will be broadcast Sunday on PBS - McGovern plays the lady of the house, an American heiress whom an estate-rich, cash-poor duke married for money but then grew to love after all.
The character, Lady Cora, has three worryingly unmarried daughters; a meddlesome and opinionated mother-in-law (Maggie Smith); and a host of preoccupations, including her husband's lack of a satisfactory male heir, an inconvenient corpse in the wrong bed and a houseful of servants with complicated personal lives.
The series became almost compulsory viewing in England. The episodes averaged 8.8million viewers - an audience share of more than 30percent.
McGovern took to the part (and to the flamboyant period hats and sumptuous gowns) as if to the manner - or manor - born. She put aside her usual timidity and lobbied hard for the role.
"I do know that they offered it to two other people, American actresses, before me," said McGovern, 49. "I did find it annoying that they were in America, and I was just sitting right here."
Being Lady Cora gave her the chance to put in practice her experience as an American living among the English - as if "I'd been rehearsing the part for 18 years," she said.
"Elizabeth had an instinctive grasp of the spot this character was in - a tremendously subtle understanding of the fact that Cora isn't quite an insider," said Julian Fellowes, the show's creator and principal writer.
McGovern describes her early years in London as "a time of great joy and peace and walking around with the pram and going to the leisure center play area."
Since then, her re-entry to work has been gradual, uncalculated and eclectic. During the past few years, she has had small parts in Kick-Ass and Clash of the Titans among other films; and supplied the voice of Wallis Simpson in a BBC radio play about Simpson's last days.
"What carried me through is the fact that I genuinely just love my job," she said. "To me, starting from what would be scratch for some people - doing a radio play or doing a very low-paid fringe theater job - is every bit as intoxicating as doing something like Once Upon a Time in America with Robert De Niro." (She appeared in that movie in 1984.)
McGovern spends her non-filming time playing her guitar and singing. She fronts and writes the songs for a band called Sadie and the Hotheads (Sadie is her less-shy alter ego), who have released an album.
Source: The Dispatch