Elizabeth McGovern of 'Downton Abbey' is throwing her corset 'in the trash' and taking on Toronto theatre, playing Ava Gardner at Mirvish

“It is like taking off a corset and just throwing it into the trash,” said the American actor in a video call from New York in September, when “The Secret Conversations” was in its final days of performances ahead of a Chicago run. It’s onstage in Toronto beginning Nov. 6.

“I’ve spent my entire life working very hard, and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy every minute of it, but trying to fulfil — and I’ll say this because this is the way the business works — a man’s vision of a woman. As I say, I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve loved every second, but this is something completely different.

“This is a woman’s story where she goes back and revisits her past and explores what that means to her at the end of the day,” McGovern said.

Ava Gardner was a star during the so-called golden age of cinema, a brunette beauty as famous for her marriages and love affairs as the films she made in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The Ava portrayed by McGovern in “The Secret Conversations” is near the end of her life.

A stroke in 1986 had ended her career. She played a rich woman in her last screen role — a CBS TV movie called “Maggie,” a pilot for a series that never got picked up — but she was broke in 1988 when she agreed to let British journalist Peter Evans ghostwrite her autobiography.

They had a series of very frank conversations about everything from her love of sex to having to learn, post-stroke, how to not pee her pants when she sneezed.

But by the time Gardner died of complications of pneumonia in her London apartment on Jan. 25, 1990, at the age of 67, she had called the book deal off. 

The interviews were published anyway, with the permission of her estate, in “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations,” released in 2013 after Evans had also died. 

That book is where the stage version of “The Secret Conversations” began.

McGovern said she was fascinated by the idea of putting “a biographer and his subject in a room and have them try to create the life story … to choose what to leave in, what to leave out.

“Then, as I started to write it, I loved the idea of creating an arc of a love affair playing out between the biographer and Ava. At the same time, she was trying to process this cycle of love affairs that had made up the centre of her life as a young woman, and she’s trying to come to terms with what that means at the end of her time on Earth,” McGovern said.

“I thought that was a really intriguing idea and much more alive than somebody telling anecdotes.”

McGovern is 64, almost the same age as Gardner was when she met Evans. Though the two women began working onscreen at similar ages, their careers have been vastly different.

Gardner was 18 when she signed a contract with MGM in 1941, a neophyte from North Carolina, chosen to do a screen test because of a photo taken by her brother-in-law. She had her breakthrough role in the 1946 film “The Killers” and was nominated for a best actress Oscar for 1953’s “Mogambo.”

The Illinois-born McGovern was 18 and attending the Juilliard School when she was offered a role in the Oscar-winning film “Ordinary People.” She began her training at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco after high school in Hollywood, where her law professor father had moved the family. Her own Oscar nomination came in 1982, for best supporting actress for “Ragtime.”

But McGovern said she and Gardner are similar in the way they were supported by and bonded to their families. “That was something I really felt a kinship with her about.”

McGovern admits she knew little about Gardner before reading Evans’ book, but “the more I’ve gotten to know her character the more I’ve fallen for her.”

The book posits that Evans fell for her too, despite the fact she could be combative and unpredictable. She often worried she was going too far in sharing tales of her famous husbands and lovers, including fellow actor Mickey Rooney, band leader Artie Shaw, crooner Frank Sinatra and movie mogul Howard Hughes — American actor Aaron Costa Ganis, who plays Evans, also portrays these men onstage.

“You can sum up my life in a sentence, honey: she made movies, she made out and she made a f—king mess of her life,” Evans quotes Gardner as saying in his book.

McGovern said she sympathizes with Gardner’s “inner turmoil” over her sexuality.

“On the one hand, she was beloved for being the world’s sexiest animal. On the other hand, she was living in a world where women weren’t supposed to have sex. And she had to straddle this real conflict within herself,” McGovern said.

“And basically, she did it by absolutely living life according to her rules for herself. But I think it caused her a lot of conflict because she was very aware that society would look on her like a wanton woman, a tart … So it was a completely irreconcilable task that was handed to her from the time she was 18 years old.

“But I think her legacy is someone who was very much ahead of her time in the sense that she lived life her way. She had sexual appetites that she embraced … she was extremely progressive politically. She had a very long-term relationship to the Black community because she’d grown up in North Carolina.”

A lot has changed in Hollywood since Gardner’s day, McGovern said, “but it’s still very much a machismo industry run by men. And it’s only now that we’re even starting to have a dialogue about that reality.

“It’s hard to imagine a world in movies where (women being sexually attractive) isn’t the predominant requirement,” she added. “I think now at least people are talking about it in a different way.”

For her own part, McGovern said she has never felt so confident and happy in her career — a lot of that has to do with finding a voice for herself in writing “Ava.”

Scripting the play was an act of “sheer desperation,” she said. The two writers to whom she and her producer had turned hadn’t penned a word, “and so I thought, ‘Well, If I had the idea, I might as well just try to do it myself.’ And as the years have gone by, I’ve grown in confidence with every production” — the play was also onstage in Los Angeles after its 2022 debut in London, England, where McGovern makes her home with her husband, director Simon Curtis. 

Now she’s keen to do more screenwriting — she’s already a songwriter via her band Sadie and the Hotheads — starting with an adaptation of the work of British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard.

That doesn’t mean she’s giving up her day job, however. 

“I feel very lucky because I still get so much joy from it,” she said about acting, which she has done extensively on both stage and screen. 

That includes the most recent “Downton Abbey” film, “The Grand Finale,” which was directed by her husband.

“I think this is our best movie for sure,” she said. “I was really afraid that we would go out with a whimper and hang on to the franchise too long, because that’s such a temptation. But for whatever reason, it’s really come together quite magically, I think. And I’m very, very proud of that.”

But she’s also happy to leave Cora Crawley behind. “I’m definitely ready to shed that part and move on.”

Playing a swearing, drinking, smoking, sexually frank Ava Gardner is part of that.

“Sometimes I wonder how much of a shock it is for ‘Downton’ fans that come to see the show because this is such a different character to what they’re looking for in Cora Crawley,” McGovern said.

“Ava: The Secret Conversations” is at the CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St., Nov. 6 to 30. See mirvish.com for tickets and information.