Like Ava Gardner, the subject of the play she’s written and stars in, Elizabeth McGovern came to Hollywood at a young age, winning her breakout role in Robert Redford’s 1980 film version of Ordinary People at 19. In 1981, she received an Oscar nomination for her incandescent performance as Evelyn Nesbit, the chorus girl whose affair with architect Stanford White led to scandal and murder, in Miloš Forman’s Ragtime (based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow). She’s worked steadily in films since and became even more recognizable in recent years as Cora Crawley, the American-born Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey , whom she has played on television and in three films since 2011.

But McGovern’s approach to Hollywood stardom has been very different from that of Gardner, whose relationship

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