Elizabeth McGovern on bringing Hollywood icon Ava Gardner to life on stage

The Oscar nominee wrote and stars in Ava: The Secret Conversations, about the drama behind the creation of Gardner's posthumously published autobiography.

Actress Elizabeth McGovern has been a familiar face on stage throughout her 45-year screen career. But theatre, she said, is a place where actors and audiences “participate in a leap of the imagination.”

In Ava: The Secret Conversations off Broadway, beginning July 29 at New York City Center, McGovern takes two leaps. She not only wrote the play, but also stars as Ava Gardner, the Golden Age screen siren who lit up Hollywood classics like Show Boat, The Killers, The Barefoot Contessa, and Mogambo.

McGovern is thrilled to be back on stage. “I find that to be incredibly exciting, obviously, but also in some ways, I find it to be very soothing,” she told New York Theatre Guide. “We are all agreeing to all sit down in a dark room and give ourselves over to this journey.”

The Juilliard-trained McGovern has always made room for theatre. Her Broadway credits include Love Letters in 1989, Hamlet in 1992, and Time and the Conways in 2017. In London, she’s headlined Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, God of Carnage, and Three Days of Rain, among many others. Most audiences know her, however, from films like Ordinary People, Once Upon a Time in America, The Bedroom Window, and Ragtime, for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

McGovern's most famous screen role in recent years — Downton Abbey’s quietly composed Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, whom McGovern has played since 2010, earning Emmy and Golden Globe nominations — is worlds apart from fiery femme fatale Gardner. In Ava, the action unfolds in Gardner’s London apartment in 1988, two years after a debilitating stroke. To help pay the bills, she’s collaborating on her autobiography with British journalist Peter Evans (Aaron Costa Ganis).

Naturally, the conversation turns to her small-town roots, MGM heyday, and her famous husbands: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. A certain eccentric billionaire named Howard Hughes also comes up.

Stress brews between Gardner and Evans: He wants to spice up the story; she wants to tell it straight. “The dynamic between the two of them is full of sexual tension,” said John Tufts, who plays Evans’s agent Ed Victor. Agreed Ganis, “Sparks fly.”

McGovern based her play on Evans’s same-titled book published after Gardner’s death, but she added in some extra drama of her own. “I took the liberty of sprinkling some magic dust on the two that are Ava Gardner and her biographer,” she said.

“At times they fall in line with each other, but they’re also having a relationship with one another that’s developing underneath the story of Ava’s life,” McGovern continued. “It’s the story of Peter and Ava and the journey they go on together. I felt like those two different levels, or many different levels, actually, of storytelling, would make it really interesting for an audience.”

The play also explores "what it took to have a career inside the old-school studio system and to blaze one’s own trail,” said director Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Gardner made her screen debut at 19; McGovern was the same age when Ordinary People came out in 1980.

“We were both very young when we got swept up in the movie industry,” McGovern said. “In many ways, my life experience has made me able to relate to her life experience, even though hers was [on a different level].”

“Similarities,” she added, “gave me confidence to think I could project some of my own experience onto what hers might have been, and let my imagination go with it.”

Get Ava: The Secret Conversations tickets now.

Gillian Russo contributed reporting for this story.

Photo credit: Elizabeth McGovern and Aaron Costa Ganis in Ava: The Secret Conversations in Los Angeles. (Photos by Jeff Lorch)