Elizabeth McGovern stands at the top of the stairs and looks at me blankly. Then the recognition: "Oh! I completely forgot," she exclaims, before ushering me into the kitchen of her home in leafiest, lightest Chiswick.

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T here is something deliciously improper about watching Elizabeth McGovern perform on stage in a rock band. But it's the contrast with Lady Cora, the delicate Edwardian matriarch she plays in Downton Abbey , that really plays havoc with the imagination. As the lead singer and songwriter of Sadie and the Hotheads, McGovern has created a kind of supercharged alter-ego, a private weekend hobby that has blossomed into a fully fledged album-producing and touring entity. Earlier in the summer, a few days before her 51st birthday, she appeared at the Hard Rock Calling festival in Hyde Park. Dressed in a black jacket, pink top, dark hot pants, slinky stockings and high-heeled silver boots, McGovern looked persuasively rock 'n' roll, if a little nervous initially, singing slightly flat on a couple of numbers before hitting her confident stride. The songs she writes are wry and personal and sufficiently difficult to place in a defined genre as to qualify for the status of idiosyncratic. She isn't interested in the technical aspects of singing, which is why she is left numb by "that excruciating show" The Voice. Her own voice is both fragile and husky, but distinctly hers, lending a quirky charm to the deft musicianship of the Hotheads. Before an autobiographical number entitled "LA Days", she made a little speech to the audience. In the early s, McGovern's face was plastered across American billboards.
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Updated: GMT, 29 October But, of course, she still does it. What if I'd stayed with that person? We'd have been in that sort of place and I'd have a great Hollywood career. I think that way a lot less than I used to, but yes, of course there have been moments when I've done that. They were engaged when she was 23 and the toast of Hollywood herself, having achieved overnight success in the family melodrama, Ordinary People, at the age of 19, and been nominated for an Oscar a year later for her brilliant performance in Milos Forman's drama, Ragtime.
What is your earliest memory? I can remember the pattern on the mattress in my cot. Barely anything else since.