Elizabeth McGovern brings screen legend Ava Gardner's life to the stage

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.

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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." Directed by Tony Award-nominee Moritz von Stuelpnagel, the production costars 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 costar 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."