For Elizabeth McGovern, the Oscar-nominated actress who plays Cora Crawley on Downton Abbey, the most difficult aspect of her new collaboration with Julian Fellowes wasnt selling him on the idea. She had come across Laura Moriartys The Chaperone while recording the audiobook version of the story—and found the pluck to plop a copy of the 2012 novel onto Fellowess lap while filming their period dramas final television season. The story was the first one that McGovern, who made her film debut in 1980s Ordinary People, had been inspired to produce herself. And Fellowes, who created and wrote Downton Abbey, immediately took to the material as well.
“What I found kind of challenging for myself is . . . our relationship on Downton Abbey is literally he writes, I act. I just do whatever Im told. And it has worked very well,” McGovern told Vanity Fair. The series ran for six seasons on television, won 15 Emmys, and will be resurrected on movie screens this September in a spin-off film. But for The Chaperone—which chronicles Louise Brookss journey to New York City as a teenager in the 1920s, before she became a silent-film flapper and sex icon—McGovern was taking on a behind-the-scenes role as well, which meant psyching herself up to the point in which she felt comfortable sharing her own story ideas.
“I tried to massage his ideas more than I ever would in the context of Downton Abbey,” McGovern said. “Because I had my own feelings about the story, and I found him to be incredibly open and such an artist. Whenever I did have a good idea, he would spark to it immediately and respond. That hadnt been our relationship prior to that point. So I had to work up my courage to have these conversations with him, in which we were more—I wouldnt say equals—but we were having more of a dialogue about the script.”
In The Chaperone, which opens in select New York theaters on March 29 and select Los Angeles theaters on April 5, McGovern stars as Norma Carlisle—a society matron who spontaneously bucks her staid lifestyle to accompany Louise (Haley Lu Richardson), a rebellious teenager, to New York.
“What I liked particularly about The Chaperone is the idea that when youre in Wichita, when youre miles away from Hollywood or New York, you are encased in a ring of [societal] certainties, absolutes, that it doesnt occur to you to challenge,” explained Fellowes. “And, sometimes, we need to get out of our own kind of safe zone in order to have a look at the life were leading, and to set it anew . . . every now and then we have to take our lives in our hands and shape it.”
The message apparently had meta-significance for McGovern. She was not only playing a character undergoing that spiritual awakening, but undergoing her own transformation off-camera as a first-time producer. And she relished that freedom, embedding the film with a tribute to her own mother.
“Theres a lot of my mother in Norma,” said McGovern. “Someone who has inherited a lot of ideas about behavior and how a woman should conduct herself. And, underneath that, she is actually quite a vibrant, alive, thinking person . . . I think that American women, in the previous generation, theres this kind of puritan heritage that we all have in our DNA—that we dont feel that it is our right to have a sexual appetite, to have a sexual life. Its not something that we feel is due to us. And so the fact that Norma is able to discover this . . . and can own her own sexuality, that it is very much part of being alive, happy, full, and whole.”
After playing Norma and producing The Chaperone, McGovern returned to the Downton Abbey set to reprise her role as Cora in a long-awaited feature film. Asked about transitioning back from producer to actress, McGovern acknowledged, “It was slightly painful. Because I loved having that voice with [Fellowes].”
Would the actress have tried to embolden Cora, had she been a Downton Abbey producer? “Of course I would have explored the character of Cora a loRead More – Source
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