Elizabeth McGovern & Ann Cusack perform at the Tabard theatre

Elizabeth McGovern 

Lady Cora as you have not seen her before – celebrating a lifelong friendship in cabaret

Elizabeth McGovern, known to many of us for her portrayal of Lady Cora in Downton Abbey, is performing at the Tabard theatre in September, with lifelong friend and fellow performer Ann Cusack.

The American actress, and Chiswick resident, has received a stack of award nominations for her acting – Academy Awards, Emmy, BAFTA, Golden Globes, and won three Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Her acting roles have included characters as diverse as Evelyn Nesbit in the screen adaptation of Ragtime (1981) and Moira, a rebel who resists the oppressive Gilead regime in The Handmaid’s Tale (1990).

Less well-known is her music career.

Elizabeth is a singer-songwriter who for nearly 20 years has been the lead singer of Sadie and the Hotheads and her show on Wednesday 16 – Sunday 20 September with blues singer Ann Cusack will be a Cabaret show – What We Know Now – with a lot of her own compositions.

The show is loosely the story of their lives.

Ann Cusack and Elizabeth McGovern

“Annie and I were born in the same town and went to the same elementary school and we’ve kept in touch over a 40 year period, so this is a story told in song celebrating the joy of female friendship”, she told The Chiswick Calendar.

That town was Evanston, Illinois, from where Elizabeth’s family moved to California and she went on to study at the famous Juilliard performing arts school, and from there into a television and film career, while Ann also became a television and film actress (TV: Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Frasier, Ally McBeal; Better Call Saul, Mr Mercedes; films: A League of their own, The Birdcage, Grosse Pointe Blank amongst many others).

Ann Cusack

Like Elizabeth, Ann has always had a parallel interest in music, and is an accomplished blues singer.

“We touch on our expectations”, Elizabeth told me. “Our mothers’ generation were happy to be wives and mothers. Their lives weren’t unhappy, but we expected to have a career, which brought added pressure but also liberation, benefits”.

The redefinition of roles which took places in the seventies made it more complicated to find satisfying relationships, she added, though both eventually did.

Elizabeth is married to the English director and producer Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn, Woman in Gold, Downton Abbey: A New Era, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale).

READ ALSO: If ever there were a Chiswick film this is it: Downton Abbey – A New Era

Ann married English actor Jim Piddock in 2023. His prolific career spans close to a hundred TV shows (Get Shorty, The Twilight Zone, Law & Order among them) as well as theatre and film (Independence Day, Lethal Weapon 2).

They are, you might say, proper Hollywood celebrity couples.

Ann and Elizabeth with the full band

Elizabeth is very down to earth about her music. Though they are excellent musicians who have produced a couple of albums, (the most recent Let’s Stop Fighting, just last year, available on Spotify), Sadie & the Hotheads have never really courted commercial success, she said.

They didn’t set out to be a “genre band” but for want of a better description their music has a jazzy Americana feel, influenced by Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

There is a song from the most recent album in the Tabard show – Riding a bike with you – in among other compositions by Elizabeth and blues standards, making a chronological whole.

“It’s about music rather than the Hollywood story. A 50-50 split between originals and well-known songs”.

Some of the blues numbers chosen by Ann, she did not know before. Along with classic numbers such as Nina Simone’s Feeling Good and Delbert McClinton’s Old Weakness (Coming on Strong) are less well-known songs.

Their intention is “just a gathering together to share – no higher ambition than that”, she told me.

“It gives us pleasure and hopefully it will give pleasure to my community in Chiswick”.

Tickets are available from the Tabard theatre here:

What We Know Now

The show is directed by the Tabard’s Artistic Director, Simon Reilly.