Downton Abbey's Elizabeth McGovern to reunite with Julian Fellowes on new project

Wigging out: Elizabeth McGovern in Sunset At The Villa Thalia
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Downton star Elizabeth McGovern will be reunited with the show’s creator Julian Fellowes for her next project — and hopes to start filming this year.

The actress, who played the Countess of Grantham in the ITV drama, is appearing at the National Theatre as the wife of a CIA agent in a new play set in Greece in the Sixties and Seventies.

She is also set to take on the title role in The Chaperone, based on a novel about silent film star Louise Brooks’s early days in Twenties New York as a dance student and her relationship with the older woman who looks after her.

McGovern, 54, has her “fingers crossed” that work will start on the film, which she has developed “over many years”. She convinced Lord Fellowes, 66, to write the screenplay.

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She said: “It is the story of a young Louise Brooks who — at the age of 15 before she became a very famous silent movie star — moved from Kansas to New York in order to study dance.

“It’s a fictional tale based on the idea that she was accompanied by a middle-aged chaperone, and it’s about the relationship between the two in changing America.”

McGovern’s turn at the National in Sunset At The Villa Thalia is her first theatre role since she signed up for Downton Abbey in 2009.

The US star said she had not planned her stage return but was attracted to Alexi Kaye Campbell’s play, about two couples who meet on a remote Greek island at a time of political upheaval, by the writing.

She said: “I never really strategise, I always just respond to writing that I like and it is interesting because Julian is a writer who was once an actor and so is Alexi, and for me they both write for actors so it’s just such a pleasure for me to go from one to another.

“It really predates Downton, my desire to work at the National, and for me it is literally every dream come true.

I’ve been living in the country for 22 years and have seen so much work here and never really thought I would be one of those actors that could actually be on the stage.”

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