3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Ava: The Secret Conversations' Review: Elizabeth McGovern's Earthy Screen Star
In 'Ava: The Secret Conversations,' Elizabeth McGovern amusingly drops the genteel, demure demeanor she has deployed to such successful effect in recent years as Lady Cora Crawley in the 'Downton Abbey' franchise. Portraying the movie star Ava Gardner, who was almost as celebrated for her volatile love life as she was for her uneven film career, Ms. McGovern gets to swear like a stevedore, seasoning virtually every sentence Ava utters with earthy epithets, generally favoring various forms of the vernacular word meaning fornication.
In this entertaining if scattershot drama, which Ms. McGovern herself wrote, based largely if not exclusively upon the book of a similar title by the British journalist Peter Evans (and Gardner), she plays the title character mostly near the end of her life. The year is 1988, and Ava is in fairly desperate straits. She has had a stroke that has left her left arm unusable and summarily ended her film career—not that it was at full throttle.
