In the late 1980s, a larger-than-life movie star from Hollywood’s bygone Golden Age began making late-night phone calls to a British journalist she’d never met. Ava Gardner, one of the Silver Screen era’s original sex symbols, was hoping Peter Evans — a onetime columnist at London’s Daily Express — would ghostwrite her memoir and make her some money.
But the relationship crumbled, and Gardner died in 1990, well before Evans’ book, “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations,” was published.
That book sat on Elizabeth McGovern’s shelf for years before the veteran actress picked it up and realized: This is a play. The result is a 90-minute trip back in time, which runs through Oct. 12 at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater, following a recent run in New York.
McGovern is perhaps best known for portraying Cora Crawley in the long-running British period drama “Downton Abbey.” Plus, she’s had a robust theater career and made her acting debut in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” shot on Chicago’s North Shore, where she is from.
For this production, she not only stars as Gardner, but she also wrote the script. What began as a pragmatic decision has proven to be empowering.
“I couldn’t find anyone else to write it, so I had to roll up my sleeves and do it,” McGovern said last week, speaking from a Fine Arts Building dressing room. “Having been the writer, it’s very liberating to see that something isn’t working and then to just take it and fix it. I’ve absolutely loved that. And that’s taught me a lot about acting.”
Now in her 60s, McGovern is exploring new skills and forging the next chapter of her career. In some ways, the new experiences represent opportunities available to her generation of Hollywood women, which Gardner and her peers lacked. Still, despite progress in gender equity in the industry, McGovern said there’s plenty that hasn’t changed. She also says the cultural perception of Gardner has far underestimated her. As McGovern sees it, Gardner was a woman ahead of her time, who unapologetically owned her sexuality and “was a full participant in her own life story.”
Backstage in Chicago, McGovern wears a bright blue blazer and metallic silver pants. Her hair, now mostly gray, is neatly pulled back. She has just arrived in Chicago from London (where she has lived for decades with her husband, the director and producer Simon Curtis), having squeezed in a brief trip home between runs of “Ava” in New York and Chicago. The production, which first premiered in 2022 in London and had a run in Los Angeles, will go next to Toronto.
As in Evans’ book, McGovern’s script unfolds along dual plot lines. There’s the story of Gardner’s life, and then there’s the developing subject-writer relationship between Gardner and Evans, each with their own agenda. Their interactions began when Gardner, who was recovering from a stroke, started making calls to Evans from her London home. Often after imbibing, she would tell the journalist about her career, starring alongside Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable in films like “The Barefoot Contessa” and “Mogambo” and her short-lived marriages to high-powered men: Frank Sinatra, Artie Shaw and Mickey Rooney.
However, their working relationship did not last. Gardner fired Evans from the project. McGovern believes it was because Gardner was unwilling to let Evans all the way into her intimate, inner world. Only decades later, in 2013, shortly after Evans’ own death, was the book published.
McGovern said she can relate to Gardner’s experience even though the Hollywood of the 1980s, when McGovern was just a teenager, was a far cry from the studio system Gardner began in.
“I think it was a very macho world, and it still is, as much as we kick and scream,” she said. “I think the thing that’s changed is we are at least talking about it, whereas I don’t think in Ava Gardner’s day there were any words to express the experience. It was so deeply ingrained in everybody’s conscious expectation of what life was that they didn’t even think that there could be another option except enduring the machismo of the culture.”
The agency that women of Gardner’s era did — or did not — possess is part of what interested McGovern in this story. Ultimately, the show grapples with the question of who controls the narrative of someone’s life.
On stage, actor Aaron Costa Ganis portrays both Evans and the men throughout Gardner’s past as the show flashes between the writer and subject and tales of days gone by.
While McGovern’s name is sure to draw some “Downton” fans to the theater, the show’s director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel, cautions that audiences should not expect to see a Cora Crawley-esque character on stage.
“This is an incredibly different role for her, and I think that’s part of the thing that’s titillating about it, is how she can transform,” von Stuelpnagel said. “She’s been a remarkable actor for several decades, and anybody who knows her from ‘Downton’ will be thrilled to rediscover her in this.”
“Ava” isn’t the only thing on McGovern’s docket this fall. She and her “Downton” costars also power the franchise’s latest film, which Curtis directed. “The Grand Finale” arrived in theaters this month, and McGovern confidently said it is their “best movie.” In Chicago, on her fourth coffee of the day, McGovern admits she is exhausted from the whirlwind fall she has had. Still, there’s a comfort in returning here.
“I feel, right away, very at home with the people,” McGovern said. “Midwesterners are just so nice. I feel like it’s the thing that’s imprinted on me most profoundly is probably those first nine years I spent in Evanston.”
Years later, it was “Ordinary People” that brought McGovern back to the Midwest. Naturally, she says she has been looking back on her experience working with Redford, who died earlier this month at the age of 89. It’s not just the man she is mourning but also his “passion about movies and their potential, which I think is on the wane at the moment,” she said.
Now, “Ava” has emboldened her to write more of the types of work she longs for: She already has a screenplay in the can. It’s early days on that project, which she cautions may never see the light of day. For now, McGovern is living in the present, which just so happens to be Hollywood, 1941.
Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.