Downton actress McGovern breaks out with ‘The Chaperone’

Impatient “Downton Abbey” followers will have to wait until September to catch up with the lords and ladies Grantham when the first feature film version of the series is slated for release. But in the meantime, there is a charming film for fans to tide them over, featuring the same writer, director and beloved star of the British series.

“The Chaperone,” which opened this weekend (at the Summerfield Cinemas in Santa Rosa), even takes place in the 1920s, with all its fabulous fashions, like “Downton,” and newly enfranchised women yearning to break free.

It is the enterprise of actress Elizabeth McGovern, who literally breaks out of her corset for a passion project she produced herself and that explores how two vastly different women unexpectedly change the course of each other’s lives at the dawn of the modern era.

Like her Downton Abbey character Cora Crawley, McGovern’s Norma is a late middle-aged wife and mother of the 1920s, hamstrung by tradition at a profound turning point in social history. Hemlines and hair were shorter. In the U.S., women were pushing boundaries, entering the workforce, learning to drive, pressing for independence and, at least for the flappers, exploring their sexuality.

It’s a fertile time for exploring issues that still resonate with women nearly a century later.

The Oscar-nominated McGovern was in San Francisco earlier this month promoting the film, one she hopes will appeal to viewers drawn to character-driven stories. It is based on the ?2012 best-seller by Laura Moriarty about a Wichita, Kansas, housewife harboring painful secrets. McGovern plays Norma Carlisle, who volunteers to chaperone a teenage Louise Brooks - before she became the legendary silent film vamp - to New York to study dancing.

Norma has an ulterior motive. As a child she was sent from a New York foundling home to the Midwest on one of the so-called “Orphan Trains,” and adopted by a farm family. She was determined to figure out who her birth mother was. In the process, through the flamboyant Brooks, she has an awakening.

“I just read this story and I loved it. I thought it would be a really charming movie that had a lot of texture and depth,” said McGovern from a suite at the Ritz Carlton hotel on Nob Hill.

The elegant 1909 landmark would make a perfect backdrop for a period piece like “The Chaperone” or “Downton Abbey.” But the 57-year-old actor, who confesses to being eager to act in more contemporary clothes, is casually out of costume in fashionably torn jeans, a black sweater and New Balance sneakers without socks.

McGovern nonetheless, said she does love stories with a historical context.

“You can see the interplay between the two personalities and how history shapes them and they shape history. And the idea of having a story at the center of which is a relationship between two very different women is also something that I feel the world could use more of. A story about a woman quite late in life who is still growing and learning and finding herself. I thought that was a refreshing idea.”

The film features Louise Brooks (Hayley Lu Richardson), the free-spirited flapper whose Buster Brown bob set off a hair-cutting craze, and who brazenly left the limelight in the late 1930s. But in an unexpected turn, Brooks takes a backseat to Norma, an unremarkable wife and mother of two grown sons.

From an anecdote

Moriarty spun out the character from the tiniest of historical footnotes.

“There is an anecdote in the history books about Louise Brooks that says at the age of 15 she traveled to New York City from Kansas, and all they say is she was accompanied by a middle-aged chaperone who was a neighbor and a housewife. Period. It was Laura Moriarty’s imagination that lit upon this tiny little anecdotal fact and said, ‘Oh yes. Louise Brooks is very interesting. But we want to explore the housewife,’?” McGovern said, underscoring the irony with a shy smile.

She felt driven to develop the book into a film.

“It never happened to me before that I was galvanized by an idea that becomes a total obsession, something you just have to do,” she said. “But there is no way you can make a movie without being a little obsessed, because it’s very difficult.”

She said she had to work up the courage to ask “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes if he would consider adapting a screenplay. He was, to her surprise, not only open but enthusiastic. She also tapped Downton director Michael Engler to direct.

“I loved his take on it,” she said of Fellowes’ interpretation. “As the script developed there were times when I would come forward with ideas and feelings. So we started dialoguing in a way I hadn’t ever experienced as part of my dynamic with him,” she said.

For a 69-year-old Conservative peer of the House of Lords, Fellowes, she maintains, has a keen understanding of women characters.

“His obsession with the interplay between the personal and the historical is so cultural, he’s such a master of it, I felt like he was the right person for this material because that’s just a big element to it,” she said, adding, “And I just happened to be standing next to him on the set.”

McGovern’s role as the sweetly supportive mum with the downcast gaze who serves as a counterpoint to the acerbic dowager Violet Crawley, played by Maggie Smith, was not so well developed on Downton Abbey. After the first season Cora slowly receded.

“I loved being a part of all that. Yet there is no way to deny it isn’t painful,” said McGovern, who reprises Cora for the upcoming “Downton Abbey” feature film slated for release in September. “You’re always in the background of somebody else’s story and summing up their plot.”

That’s why she’s hoping “The Chaperone” will find an audience of people, perhaps among older women, who can see something of themselves in the story of a woman who reinvents herself in her 50s.

“Oftentimes when I feel inspired to go to a movie, I look at my options and there’s nothing for me. There’s nothing that interests me. They’re catering to people who like cartoons.”

English influence

McGovern speaks with just a tinge of English inflection, and drops into conversational Britishisms like “whilst.” Although she’s American, and was raised in Los Angeles, McGovern - who briefly attended the American Conservatory Theater’s ACT Academy at 17 - left Hollywood in her early 30s when she married British director and producer Simon Curtis. It changed the trajectory of her budding career.

McGovern was not even 20 when she was plucked from The Juilliard School for a part in “Ordinary People.” The Robert Redford-directed film swept up the Academy Awards in 1981, including best picture. Audiences fell in love with McGovern, a blue-eyed and baby-faced beauty in a Fair Isle sweater and dark, Princess Diana bob. Powerful parts followed, and an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Evelyn Nesbit in “Ragtime.”

She said starting over in London, without the heavy mantle of her image as a Hollywood movie star, was liberating and forced her to explore new areas that she might never have explored, including performing in her own band, “Sadie and the Hotheads.”

“I had cleaned the slate and was starting again in this new country anonymously and kind of anything was possible,” she said.

It also enabled her to have a “secure and happy” private life, which includes grown daughters Matilda and Gracie.

She said for their sake, she’s thrilled that the #MeToo movement is unleashing women to push back against sexual harassment and intimidation and permitting them to speak up and recognize it for what it is. She said she’s extremely lucky that early success spared her the kind of abuse that so many other actresses have endured.

“I feel relieved this is kind of a place we’ve found ourselves in as women. For all the other things going on in the world, that we have every right to get depressed about, this is the one thing that has been quite positive. I really do think that women are now talking and seizing hold of this right not to have to deal with this kind of culture. That’s an extremely positive thing.”

McGovern said it’s a rich time in her life, with, as she puts it in her slightly British way, many “things on the boil.” In addition to her music, she will be doing a play in London’s West End with Matthew Broderick. She’s written her own play and is in search of a theater and producer. And she’s just finished filming a part in a new eight-part contemporary adaption of “The War of the Worlds,” where she and Gabriel Byrne play an estranged couple who are suddenly thrown together and forced to deal with the shards of their marriage amid the panic of an alien invasion.

She said the work is still joyful, particularly producing and starring in a film of her own choosing and enterprise.

“It’s an empowering feeling that parallels the part in the film in a way because she (Norma) discovers she can write her own happiness,” McGovern said. “I suppose I feel that in my professional life as well. I feel very lucky and liberated by that.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey.