'Downton Abbey' star Elizabeth McGovern brings Ava Gardner's tumultuous life to the stage

NEW YORK – For all of Elizabeth McGovern's acting career, someone else wrote her lines. Now it's her turn.

The “Downton Abbey” star pivots from British aristocracy to classic Hollywood royalty this summer to portray screen legend Ava Gardner in a play she wrote.

“It’s an incredible feeling to see other people embrace these things that were in your head,” she says. “My feet haven’t touched the ground since we started working on this in New York. I am just loving it so much.”

“Ava: The Secret Conversations” examines the sometimes-prickly, sometimes seductive relationship between Gardner and Peter Evans, a journalist assigned to ghostwrite her memoir in the years before her death in 1990.

Though Gardner pulled the plug on the project before its completion, Evans eventually published their conversations in 2013. That book is the basis of McGovern's play.

She says she was intrigued by the idea of “a star on the wane of her career, sitting with a guy trying to glean from her the story of her life, and the two of them battling it out to control the narrative.”

About ‘Ava: The Secret Conversations’

Directed by Tony Award-nominee Moritz von Stuelpnagel, the production co-stars Aaron Costa Ganis as Evans, who also channels Gardner’s three famous husbands: actor Mickey Rooney, bandleader Artie Shaw and performer Frank Sinatra. It begins performances off-Broadway at New York City Center starting this week.

McGovern says she wasn't initially a huge fan of Gardner — famed for her green eyes, photogenic features and understated acting style — before she embarked on the project. It was more the idea of how a memoir can become a battleground for legacy and a way to explore Hollywood fame.

McGovern made her screen debut at 20 in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” in 1980 and went on to co-star with Hollywood’s leading men, including Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. She landed an Oscar nomination for Milos Forman’s “Ragtime.” It's a career with many similarities to Gardner.

“I feel like I do have a natural affinity for who she is. I feel like we would really like each other. I don’t know, I’m flattering myself, but it’s possibly because I had a kind of similar trajectory in my early life,” says McGovern. "I mean, it was not on any level close to hers, but I understood the whole kind of mechanics of it.”

Gardner's reputation as a sex goddess was fully launched in 1946 film “The Killers,” in which she co-starred with Burt Lancaster. She also starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in “The Barefoot Contessa” and Richard Burton in Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana.”

McGovern says Gardner was caught in the impossibility of women's expectations at the time — be sexy but not sleep around. She had many lovers but also felt the shame society imposed.

“I think she was a kind of a feminist, in spite of herself, really,” says McGovern “I hope people are inspired by that — by the fact that she just did whatever she wanted to do and lived with the consequences.”

A screen siren at the end of her life

By the end of her life and when the play is set, Gardner has been partially paralyzed after a stroke, had emphysema and lived in seclusion. She decided on a quickie memoir to keep the bills paid.

“All my life I was the Woman Men Dream About. That was the only job I ever had,” she wails in the play. “Where does that leave me now?”

The 90-minute play, which has had previous runs in Los Angeles and London, goes to Chicago and Toronto this fall after New York.

McGovern initially took the idea to two different writers who failed to produce anything. So she turned to herself, watching movies and footage of Gardner to nail her speech patterns and reading whatever she could about the actor's inner life.

“I literally would act it out in my room to myself and then write it down. So it was natural to think of myself playing it, obviously, but then writing a part for somebody else to play, I couldn’t think of a way to do it except by doing the acting of that part and then write it down.”

Costa Ganis, her co-star, says “she’s doing something very bold and very daring and very scary” and he rarely meets a playwright so adaptable. “I think the thing that’s so fun about working with her is just that she’s such a collaborator,” he says.

Music helped McGovern the playwright

McGovern developed the confidence to write her first play through songwriting. She is the lead singer and an acoustic guitarist for Sadie & The Hotheads, which released their debut album in 2007 and their latest in July, “Let's Stop Fighting.”

“It kind of embraces a lot of different styles and then ends up with something of its own,” she says of the ethereal jazz-folk the band makes, which is waiting for an audience to catch up. “We’re still waiting. It’s been quite a while, but I’m fine,” she says with a laugh.

Costa Ganis hears McGovern's musicality throughout the play, an internal rhythm she understands: "So if something doesn’t play right, she has a great sense of what sounds good and what moves things along."

McGovern will be nearing the end of her New York turn as Gardner when the latest “Downton Abbey” hits movie theaters Sept. 12 — subtitled “The Grand Finale.” She admits that she and the cast initially dreaded returning after the death of Maggie Smith, an audience favorite.

“I think everyone was afraid that without Maggie, it’s daunting to keep the thing going. But surprise, surprise, I think it’s our best movie,” she says. “It just kind of clicked.”

McGovern, who like Gardner lives in London, does music, TV, and film but always finds room for theater, where the smartphones disappear and performers meet the audience.

“It’s so healthy to have two hours where you only have one job and that job is basically just to be present and I really feel like it’s good for the brain.”