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Don’t waste your life, make great things, change the world.

M.P. (via overcalm)

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[in Season 2]

Cora: You wanna run Downton Abbey?

Isobel: Yes.

Cora: Well... you can't.

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Cora Crawley

reblog if u agree

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(x)

There is not enough material yet, c’mon let’s do this!!

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From Hollywood to London mom

Published: 6 May 2007 - The Sunday Times

Elizabeth McGovern, once a movie A-lister, tells Rosie Millard why she quit for British suburbia

Wanting to be famous is a really rather dull ambition these days. It’s much more interesting to have fame and then deliberately walk away from it. While she may not quite be the Greta Garbo of the early 21st century, this is pretty much what the actress Elizabeth McGovern did, trading in life as a Hollywood star for that of a west London mother.

Back in 1980 McGovern was picked, aged 19, to act opposite Timothy Hutton in the Oscar-winning film Ordinary People, which was directed by Robert Redford. She was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar a year later for her role in Milos Forman’s Ragtime. Briefly engaged to Sean Penn, her star continued to ascend with work in films such as Once Upon a Time in America and She’s Having a Baby. By the end of the 1980s, McGovern was pretty much an Alist fixture.

There is still quite a lot of the Hollywood allure about McGovern, now 45, tiny and perfectly coiffed. Sitting in a Chiswick coffee shop she admits she had an almost disgracefully easy start. “I know,” she says, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “I pole-vaulted over everything at the beginning.” So why jack it all in and end up living at the end of the deeply unstarry District line in west London? “It was never my ambition to come to England,” she says. “I was married, pregnant and starting a new phase in my life.”

Probably about the same time that Sean Penn was getting hitched to Madonna, McGovern was quietly falling in love with Simon Curtis, a film producer raised in Putney, west London. And so Burbank took second place to the burbs.

She says it was serendipity. “Moving to England happened to suit my personality. I have always been not so much an Anglophile but drawn to the kind of work which comes out of England. Writer-orientated, respectful of literature.”

Serendipity or not, life in England seems to have served her well; as well as bringing up their two daughters, Matilda, 14, and Grace, 9, McGovern has appeared in a series of acclaimed plays, including Three Days of Rain at the Donmar. She will be seen on BBC2 on Saturday in Daphne, a biopic of Daphne du Maurier, in which she plays the beautiful American heiress Ellen Doubleday.

Is she content? Actively relinquishing the chalice offered by Hollywood, no matter how poisoned it may eventually turn out to be, is a strong gesture. “It was a huge adjustment for me,” she acknowledges. “Do I regret it? The trouble with the career I am in is that there is such a huge opportunity for regret no matter what choices you make. There is always the part you turned down, the place you weren’t in. Certainly the marriage I have had, and the family I have had, has compensated.”

Although she claims to have no structure to her career other than just “putting one foot in front of the other”, her decision to go for rather highbrow, uncommercial artistic ventures now looks like a rather clever move. Indeed, since then it is one that has been mirrored by various other high-profile American stars. From Kevin Spacey playing Richard II at the Old Vic to Madonna’s passion for tweedy field sports, it’s rather chic to be an Anglophile nowadays.

“When I came over here I don’t think there was anyone else here from Hollywood,” says McGovern, with the air of the pioneer. “It’s now something that famous people are more inclined to do now. London is now so much more appealing. Since I moved here almost 15 years ago, this place has changed so much.”

What in particular has changed? “Oh my God!” she says. “So much! It’s become so much more cosmopoli-tan! It may be superficial, but grocery stores are open at all hours of the day, there’s a great deal more variety, things are much more accessible. It is much more of a modern city, on an American model.”

So do mothers at the school gates know that the rather gorgeous Mrs Curtis was once a highly feted Hollywood name and engaged to Sean Penn? “Do you know, that just never comes up,” she says, laughing. “It never comes up. I love being a mother at the school gate, and I love the other mothers there, but they have no idea who I am. I put on a different face, and a different set of clothes.”

She has certainly acquired a rather engaging and wholly unHollywood ability to laugh at herself. One of the things she is most proud of is Freezing, the BBC4 comedy directed by her husband. She freely acknowledges that it is based on their joint histories.

“Yes, it’s about a middle-aged American movie star who finds herself living in a west London suburb, and trying to keep her career going. And her fluffy husband [played by Hugh Bonneville], who is trying to keep her happy. It’s very funny. Think Notting Hill, 10 years on.”

But why is it called Freezing, I ask her. “Well, in Hollywood, when you are getting all the offers, you are what’s known as ‘hot’. When you aren’t, you are the opposite.” It is probably never going to be the case for Elizabeth McGovern, wherever she lives.

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Elizabeth McGovern: But I am Lady Grantham. Please let me appear in an English play

By Rosie Kinchen - May 15 2016, The Sunday Times

Elizabeth McGovern on the South Bank in London by Vicki Couchman

lizabeth McGovern may be the most British person I have ever met, despite being an American. Today, dressed in dark jeans and a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt, she still somehow conjures up a world of Merchant Ivory films, syllabub and stammering upper-class Englishmen. Even her American accent, although pronounced, has been sucked in and laced up to sound every bit as posh as Maggie Smith’s.

Downton Abbey ended last year and I had expected to find McGovern, 54, who played Lady Cora, high on career opportunities thanks to Julian Fellowes, Downton’s creator. Instead she is furiously downplaying the entire Downton experience. She is rarely recognised and finds that when walking near her home in Chiswick, west London, her new chihuahua generates more interest than she does. “People want to take a picture of the puppy and cut out Cora’s face,” she laughs.

Instagram picture posted by @ chelseachihuahua

McGovern has the beauty of a Hollywood star but the kind of personality that is uncomfortable in the limelight. She admits to feeling “liberated” that the series has come to an end: “I was in the camp that wanted it to stop before they were begging us to stop. I thought it had had a nice run.”

We are meeting in a labyrinthine set of back offices at the National Theatre where she is in rehearsals for a new play and her soft, soulful face is glowing with excitement. “I can’t describe how euphoric it is for me,” she says about making it to the heart of Britain’s theatrical world. Bumping into Helen McCrory in the lobby had left her speechless because “she is the kind of actress I revere and never thought I would be working alongside”.

The strange thing about McGovern’s career is that it has in some respects gone backwards. Before she moved to the UK in the early 1990s she was well on her way to Hollywood superstardom. Born in Illinois, she was studying at the Juilliard School in New York when she landed a role in Robert Redford’s 1980 directorial debut, Ordinary People. In 1982 she was nominated for an Academy award for her performance in Ragtime. She also starred opposite Robert De Niro and at the age of 22 was engaged, briefly, to Sean Penn.

Her life took an unusual turn when she met her future husband, the British director Simon Curtis (whose films include My Week with Marilyn), at a party in New York. She relocated to London where Curtis had a job at the BBC and they instantly started a family. “It was hard,” she says. “I felt as though I was screwing my career up and it was really painful.” At the same time she felt “confident” that it was a life “that would feed and nurture me with the guy that I met and it turned out I was right”.

Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Crawley in Downton Abbey by Nick Briggs

More than 20 years on they have two daughters and McGovern has settled almost seamlessly into the British way of life. “I think I was always more British than American in my nature — not that I was ever aware of it. I have a natural British reticence,” she says.

Nevertheless, her career has taken a hit. “America is a country that is built from immigrants in recent memory. Whereas when somebody moves to England it’s not an easy community to crack,” she admits.

She has had a steady stream of work with roles in The House of Mirth and A Room with a View, before Downton, but for the most part she has never managed to break free of the “American box”.

“My real dream come true would be to be cast in an English play, or in a classic play, and that hasn’t happened. So I don’t know if that is a door I’ll ever be able to open,” she shrugs. “I did do years of Shakespeare in America so it’s difficult.”

The new play, Sunset at the Villa Thalia, is about the impact of British and American culture on Greece in the 1960s before the military coup. Once again she plays an American.

She is thrilled to be doing it because, like many other actresses, she suffers from the severe shortage of good roles for women over 40: “It makes no sense that there are no parts for women because there are women that want to see themselves represented.”

While the number of female writers and directors is rising, the decision-makers when it comes to “financing” are still men. “A lot of the time it’s guys making decisions and they are making decisions based on what they think they want to see,” she says.

The way to cope is to find scripts with parts she would be interested in playing and to try to push them to fruition herself. The latest is a project she is developing with Fellowes. It came about when she was captivated by a novel about the silent-film star Louise Brooks, which imagined the actress’s journey from Wichita, Kansas, to New York accompanied by a middle-class female chaperone. Both women “have life-changing experiences along the way”, she says.

Fellowes, she adds, has written an “absolutely wonderful script” and they are hoping that filming will start later this year.

The shortage of tempting roles has also allowed her to pursue an unlikely career as the lead singer in a rock’n’roll band, Sadie and the Hotheads. The group was formed almost 10 years ago but the Downton effect has provided its members with an audience so they can now tour.

At first the audiences were “exclusively” fans of the show which “was challenging because I think they were expecting a string quartet”, McGovern laughs. Instead they have been treated to joyful rock ballads such as the Cow Song (“All the cows ever seem to do is eat/ It’s nice to watch the way they chew/ I’m glad you brought me here with you”).

Now they have a growing body of die-hard fans and have gigged in “Birmingham, Perth, Milton Keynes. It was so much fun it felt like being a kid,” she cries. Well, perhaps she’s a little bit American after all.

Sunset at the Villa Thalia is at the National Theatre from May 25-August 4. Pre-order Sadie and the Hotheads’ new album via PledgeMusic

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Me af.

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Loved it, both Geraldine and Elizabeth were so on point.

has anyone seen Daphne? it’s this 2007 tv movie about Daphne Du Maurier starring Geraldine Somerville and Elizabeth McGovern. i have so many feelings about it.

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Elizabeth mcgovern at the launch of Judith Owen album, 21st April.

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Latch live from madison square garden - sam smith @mcgonneville @thehiddenbaroness @emma-in-the-rabbit-hole @everyshipunsinkable

Last song you listened too.

Ok y'all I’m bored as hell and want t get to know you guys more, so I’m doing something different. Name the last song you listened to and then tag 6 people. @sturmgewehrr @glock-princess @crysomemoar @texasinmyrearviewmirror @rjtheradnosereindeer @ivegot1911reasons you know what to do. Mine was Miles Davis- Flamenco Sketches.

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A very young Elizabeth McGovern explaining how she once set a stage on fire. Ahaha. Cool pants

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Cora Crawley being adorable in S04E07

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Elizabeth McGovern impersonating the Brits is what I live for

credits: theonewithladycora

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BTS - season two

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The kind of partner each sign wants/needs!