FOr the Maudlin among us, the last film in Downton Abbey should perhaps go hand in hand with a warning. Everything is in front of melancholy – – A farewell to estimated characters and a farewell to a stately home that was a robust presence in a temporary world. When the ITV series started in 2010, life wasn't … better? Did Elizabeth McGovern feel that too, the sense of time? After all, her character Cora now ages with her husband Lord Grantham from the custody of Downton in favor of a younger generation and a changing era in the 1930s.
“NO!” says McGovern and grabs me out of my melancholy. “I am very excited that I go into a pleasant new phase in my career.” There is not only Cora, but also the piece she wrote Ava: the secret conversations. With McGovern as Hollywood actor Ava Gardner, it will run in New York, Chicago and Toronto after his debut in London in 2022. There is also a new album from Your music inspired by humans. “I have the feeling that I am just starting,” she explains when we meet in the London office of her publicist. At first glance, McGovern, finer and composer, tender-but if you only make the first impressions, you will miss your rebellious spirit.
Not that Downton Abbey: The grand finale was not emotional. “As a filmmaker, you don't have to work very hard to touch this depth because we have been working on it for so many years,” she says. McGovern feared that the absence of Maggie Smith, who died last year after giving the show the Brillant -devastating widow countess, would feel too much defeat for the Downton world. But she says that Smith's presence “penetrates” it. “She is still very much in the atmosphere. I don't have the feeling that there is a big hole. In fact, it freed the rest of the story to have a river because it doesn't hear for her moments. But everything that she represents is there.
Downton's women, whether the steel Lady Mary or the spirited young cook Daisy, are gratifyingly hard, but Cora, who normally supports quietly in the background, never seemed so robust, even though it was her money – as an American heritage – it all went. Was that difficult to play? “Sometimes yes,” says McGovern. “As a contemporary woman, I think it is difficult to feel the street of that time.” Has she ever fought for Cora more agency? “I wish she sometimes had more interesting stories,” says McGovern, but adds that it would not have been appropriate that she would have had more political or social power because it would simply not be correct for the time. “
However, Cora is a vision of an exciting America; The daughter of a Jewish immigrant who was installed in Downton with her bags with new money and its progressive prospects. If Downton were now set instead of coming here to upgrade the class -crowned paths of Britain, she would be a wealthy liberal refugee, a bit like Ellen DeGeneres who flees America. McGovern, which grew up in California, has lived in Great Britain for the past 32 years. It is shocked and disappointed with modern US policy.
“I mean,” she says, “it is a reality that must have been blown away under what I thought was for America. It can't come out of nowhere.” But if she describes herself as a positive person, she adds: “I think it will be painful, but we have too much successful history as a free country for ourselves to let go. It is our responsibility to ensure that we adhere to everything that I was confident – and complacent.”
McGovern had great success early on. Her debut took place in Robert Redford's 1980 film of ordinary people and she won an Oscar nomination for her role in her second film Ragime. A part of Sergio Leones once followed in America, opposite Robert de Niro. “I think I had the feeling: 'My goodness, it's not as difficult as people say.'” She smiles. “Until I later experienced how difficult it is. My experience was early in keeping my head straight, doing a job for job and doing what most people do in this age. Try later how difficult it is to maintain a career.”
She was not a showbiz family: her parents were teachers. And although she loved acting since her child, it was never about becoming a star. As a young woman in an often dangerous industry, she probably protected her. “I was never desperate, so I could always go away. Many young women didn't feel like they could. I think I was very lucky.”
She also showed the disadvantages of fame. “I think I avoid it myself, but the price you pay for fame is that it will be really difficult to have intimacy relationships because you are collateral.
Many early roles of McGovern were the girlfriend of the male leadership. Then she says: “I became a perfect woman from the girlfriend and found frustrating.
Brad Pitt played McGovern's friend in the Comedy The Gace from 1994. We joke – bitter – that she would now be with him in a film that she would probably be occupied as his mother. This says a lot about what is still considered desirable for a woman, although McGovern at 64 is only three years of Pitt's senior. “I really don't think that we, just because society looks at something like that, we have to have this discussion with my daughters. We can feel independent of consensus in society. I just did my own thing and just continued it.”
It builds up, not inappropriate if I point out that it rarely appears rarely in her business. Was that a political decision? “Not really. But once again I feel like a woman my age – that's what we are asked about. I regret it through society.”
It is something like McGovern carves her own way. She left Hollywood and moved to London to start a family. She has two adult daughters with her husband, filmmaker and producer Simon Curtis (who led the grand finale). She approached her 40s and founded a band, sadie and the heat heads, and began to publish music. “I have to remember it,” she says, “that people either like it or they become – and whatever they feel for me. It's about.”
In the fifties, she wrote her piece about Gardner, attracted to the actor's independent spirit. Now in the 1960s she is writing a script, although she won't say what it is about. “It's my next obsession. I really want to write things. I'm very excited about it.” This is partly a way to create interesting work for themselves as an older actor. There was certainly a lot about talking about it – does she believe that the situation has improved? “Not that I noticed it.”
She loved the youngest show who died for sex, in which Michelle Williams plays an terminally ill woman in the forties who begins a last attempt to explore sexual research. “It is such a female story. I found it really encouraging, but it won't be about someone my age.” Why? Is it because society looks at the idea of older women who shocked a sex life? “I may think, yes, yes. I mean, what can we do as women, except that we just keep going and not be able to shop? We have no other choice.”
If it takes a bit of effort, the payment is certainly worth it and have a little to say goodbye. “It is a daily exercise when you adjust your head to the right thing. It is not that I accuse someone of accepting the status quo, but it doesn't mean that I have to. Under no circumstances.” She laughs. “Under no circumstances.”