Last Updated on March 18, 2023

Elizabeth McGovern Biography

Elizabeth McGovern, born Elizabeth Lee McGovern, is an American film, television and theatre actress.

She has appeared in several notable films such as Ragtime, Downton Abbey, Ordinary People, Once Upon a Time in America, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Wings of the Dove, and The Chaperone.

Elizabeth was born on the 18th of July 1981 in Evanston, Illinois to Katherine Wolcott (born Watts), and William Montgomery McGovern, Jr., a university professor. She was the oldest with a younger sister named Cammie McGovern, an author/novelist.

While she was still very young, the family moves to Los Angeles where her father started teaching at UCLA. She performed in Thornton Wilder’s play, “The Skin Of Our Teeth”. Joan Scott, an agent, found her quite exceptional and advised her to seek out some acting classes.

Elizabeth McGovern Age

Elizabeth Lee McGovern was born on July 18, 1961, in Evanston, Illinois, U.S.

Elizabeth McGovern Husband | Elizabeth McGovern Simon Curtis

She has been married to a British Film Director, Simon Curtis since 1992 and the couple has two children together.

Elizabeth McGovern Children | Elizabeth McGovern Daughter

McGovern and her husband have two daughters named Matilda and Grace.

Elizabeth McGovern Net Worth

She has a net worth of $4 million dollars.

Elizabeth McGovern Acting Career | Elizabeth McGovern Music Career

In 1980, while learning at Juilliard, McGovern was offered a section in what turned into her first film, Ordinary People, in which she played the sweetheart of disturbed adolescent Conrad Jarrett (Timothy Hutton). The next year she finished her acting instruction at the American Conservatory Theater and Juilliard, and started to show up in plays, first Off-Broadway and later in quite a while.

In 1981 she earned an Academy Award assignment for Best Supporting Actress for her job as Evelyn Nesbit in the film Ragtime. In 1984, she featured in Sergio Leone’s hoodlum epic Once Upon a Time in America as Robert De Niro’s sentimental intrigue Deborah Gelly.

She had driving jobs in two different movies that year, Racing with the Moon, a story about growing up additionally featuring Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage, and the parody Lovesick, as a patient whose therapist (Dudley Moore) goes gaga for her, taking a chance with his training.

In 1989, she played Mickey Rourke’s better half in Johnny Handsome, coordinated by Walter Hill, and that year she showed up as a defiant lesbian in Volker Schlöndorff’s film The Handmaid’s Tale. McGovern co-featured with Kevin Bacon in a lighthearted comedy, She’s Having a Baby, coordinated by John Hughes, and featured in the spine chiller The Bedroom Window, coordinated by Curtis Hanson. She cooperated with Michael Caine in 1990s A Shock to the System, a comic puzzle about a man who plots the homicide of his significant other.

In a 1994 parody, The Favor, McGovern played a lady who undermines her sweetheart (played by Brad Pitt) by turning into her wedded closest companion’s intermediary in a tryst with a man the companion has fantasized about.

McGovern showed up in various movies in the 21st century, incorporating Woman dressed in Gold, a dramatization featuring Helen Mirren. McGovern has shown up in a few TV creations, for the most part in the UK. In 1999 and 2000 McGovern played Marguerite St. Just in a BBC TV arrangement approximately dependent on the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel.

On American TV, she showed up in a 2006 scene of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit titled “Damage,” in which her character of Dr. Confidence Sutton was a therapist blamed for complicity in prisoner misuse.

Her other TV work incorporates Broken Glass (Arthur Miller, 1996); Tales from the Crypt; The Changeling; Tales from Hollywood; the HBO arrangement Men and Women; The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt; Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theater (“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”); and If Not for You (CBS 1995, claim arrangement). In May 2007, she played Ellen Doubleday, Daphne du Maurier’s lover, in Daphne, a BBC2 TV show by Amy Jenkins dependent on Margaret Forster’s life story of the creator.

In December 2008, McGovern showed up as Dame Celia Westholme in “Meeting with Death”, a scene of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Around the same time, she showed up in the three-section BBC parody arrangement Freezing, composed by James Wood and coordinated and co-delivered by her significant other Simon Curtis.

First, communicate on BBC Four, it likewise appeared on BBC2 in February 2008. McGovern played an American exile entertainer named Elizabeth, living in Chiswick with her distributer spouse, played by Hugh Bonneville, and co-featuring Tom Hollander as her dramatic operator. From 2010 to 2015, she depicted Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, spouse of Robert Crawley, seventh Earl of Grantham (played by Hugh Bonneville) in the British TV arrangement Downton Abbey.

McGovern is additionally an artist lyricist. In 2008 she started fronting the band Sadie and the Hotheads at The Castle bar setting in Portobello Road, London. The band discharged a collection of tunes she created with The Nelson Brothers, who are presently part of the band.

The collection likewise incorporates Ron Knights on bass and Rowan Oliver, obtained from Goldfrapp, as the drummer for the chronicle sessions. Michelle Dockery, who plays McGovern’s oldest girl in Downton Abbey, has incidentally sung with the band.

Elizabeth McGovern Theatre

Roles in New York include:

• Melissa Gardner in Love Letters (A R Gurney) at the Edison Theatre, October 1989
• Ophelia in Hamlet with the Roundabout Theater Company at the Criterion Center Stage Right, April 1992.
• Mrs. Conway in Time and the Conways at the American Airlines Theatre, October 2017

In her theatre program CVs (below), McGovern lists her other theatre work in the U.S. as including:

• My Sister in This House (Wendy Kesselman)
• Painting Churches (Tina Howe)
• The Hitch-Hiker
• A Map of the World (David Hare)
• Aunt Dan and Lemon (Wallace Shawn)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Winter 1987[13]
• When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (Sharman Macdonald)
• Maids of Honour
• Three Sisters (Chekhov)
• As You Like It

Since moving to London, McGovern’s stage work has included:

• Jenny in The Misanthrope (Molière freely adapted by Martin Crimp) at the Young Vic Theatre, February 1996
• Darlene in Hurlyburly (David Rabe) at the Old Vic Theatre, March 1997
• Nan and Lina in Three Days of Rain (Richard Greenberg) at the Donmar Warehouse, March and November 1999
• Beth in Dinner With Friends (Donald Margulies) at the Hampstead Theatre, June 2001
• Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne adapted by Phyllis Nagy) at the Minerva Theatre, August 2005
• Jackie Kennedy in Aristo at the Minerva Theatre, September – October 2008
• Judith Brown in Complicit by Joe Sutton in The Old Vic, January 2009
• Miss A in The Shawl by David Mamet in the Arcola Theatre, September 2009
• Veronica in God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza at the Theatre Royal, Bath, August – September 2018

McGovern was awarded the 2013 Will Award by the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Elizabeth McGovern Movies

Here is a list of her movies;

• Ordinary People
• Last Year’s Model
• Ragtime
• Lovesick
• Once Upon a Time in America
• Racing with the Moon
• Native Son
• The Bedroom Window
• She’s Having a Baby
• Johnny Handsome
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• A Shock to the System
• Tune in Tomorrow…
• King of the Hill
• Me and Veronica
• The Favor
• Wings of Courage
• The Wings of the Dove
• The Man with Rain in His Shoes
• The Misadventures of Margaret
• Manila
• The House of Mirth
• Buffalo Soldiers
• The Truth
• Inconceivable
• Kick-Ass
• Clash of the Titans
• Angel’s Crest
• Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
• Unexpected
• Woman in Gold
• Swung
• Showing Roots
• The Wife
• The Commuter
• The Chaperone
• Downton Abbey

Elizabeth McGovern TV Shows

Here is a list of her TV Shows;

• California Fever
• Faerie Tale Theatre
• Women & Men: Stories of Seduction
• Ashenden
• Tales from Hollywood
• Performance
• If Not for You
• Broken Trust
• Broken Glass
• The Summer of Ben Tyler
• Tracey Takes On…
• Tales from the Crypt
• Clover
• The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Thursday the 12th
• The Flamingo Rising
• Hawk
• Table 12
• The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire
• Three Moons over Milford
• Daphne
• A Room with a View
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Freezing
• Agatha Christie’s Poirot
• 10 Minute Tales
• Downton Abbey

Elizabeth McGovern Downton Abbey

She played the role of Cora, Countess of Grantham in both the movie and TV show. Excitement is high at Downton Abbey when the Crawley family learns that King George V and Queen Mary are coming to visit.

But trouble soon arises when Mrs. Patmore, Daisy and the rest of the servants learn that the king and queen travel with their own chefs and attendants — setting the stage for an impromptu scheme and other shenanigans.

Release date: September 20, 2019 (USA)
Director: Michael Engler
Screenplay: Julian Fellowes
Producers: Julian Fellowes, Liz Trubridge, Gareth Neame
Production companies: Carnival Productions, Perfect World Pictures

Elizabeth McGovern Once Upon A Time In America

She played the character role of Deborah Gelly (adult) in this movie. In 1968, the elderly David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro) returns to New York, where he had a career in the criminal underground in the ’20s and ’30s.

Most of his old friends, like longtime partner Max (James Woods), are long gone, yet he feels his past is unresolved. Told in flashbacks, the film follows Noodles from a tough kid in a Jewish slum in New York’s Lower East Side, through his rise to a bootlegger and then Mafia boss — a journey marked by violence, betrayal, and remorse.

Release date: June 1, 1984 (USA)
Director: Sergio Leone
Featured song: Cockey’s Song
Box office: 5.3 million USD
Awards: BAFTA Award for Best Film Music, etc.

Elizabeth McGovern Ordinary People

She was Jeannine Pratt in this movie. Tormented by guilt following the death of his older brother, Buck, in a sailing accident, alienated teenager Conrad Jarrett (Timothy Hutton) attempts suicide.

Returning home following an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital, Conrad tries to deal with his mental anguish and also reconnect with his mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), who has grown cold and angry, and his emotionally wounded father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland), with the help of his psychiatrist, Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch).

Release date: September 19, 1980 (USA)
Director: Robert Redford
Awards: Academy Award for Best Picture, etc.
Nominations: Academy Award for Best Actress, etc.
Screenplay: Alvin Sargent, Nancy Dowd

Elizabeth McGovern Racing With The Moon

She played the role of Caddie Winger in this movie. In their last weeks before deployment to World War II as Marines, teenage friends Henry Nash (Sean Penn) and Nicky (Nicolas Cage) try to make the best of the time they have left in their small California town.

When Nash spots Caddie Winger (Elizabeth McGovern), a new girl in town he mistakenly believes to be wealthy, he sets about winning her over. But the good times are ruined when Nicky finds himself trying to solve a serious predicament, and implicating Nash and Caddie in the process.

Initial release: March 23, 1984
Director: Richard Benjamin
Box office: 6.046 million USD
Music composed by Dave Grusin
Screenplay: Steve Kloves

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Elizabeth McGovern Singing | Sadie and the Hotheads on This Morning