She's a transplant to the state who has lived all over the country. Mills' provincialism because we shared a love of theater,'' Moriarty says.īecause that's the only information Moriarty had, she stayed true to it, making Cora Carlisle a fan of the arts, the theater in particular.Īs for the chaperone's provincialism? Moriarty made the character a 36-year-old Wichita housewife who might have been more provincial than Brooks, but her desire to be less so is what spurs her to volunteer to spend the summer in New York with a precocious and irreverent teenage girl.Īnd Moriarty doesn't think Kansans are especially provincial. 'The only lines in Louise's memoirs for the entire summer they spent together when Louise was 15 was: 'I tolerated Ms. Information about the real chaperone has been lost to history. Moriarty says she changed the real woman’s name in the novel to allow herself leeway in creating a character and her movement within the plot, which was based on facts from Brooks' life. The real-life chaperone was named Alice Mills.

She stars as Norma Carlisle (Cora's name was changed for the film because McGovern's 'Downton Abbey' character was also named Cora). McGovern asked 'Downton Abbey' creator Julian Fellowes to write a screenplay, and then helped produce it. 'The Chaperone' is the fourth of Moriarty’s five novels.Įlizabeth McGovern of 'Downton Abbey' fame voiced the audio version of the book and told Moriarty that she felt a connection to the character of the chaperone, Cora Carlisle. 'I was like, 'Wow, I wrote that line on my living room couch, and now a character is saying it.' Or, 'That's how I described that scene, and all these people have worked to make it look that way,'' she says. Moriarty was at the New York City premiere on March 25 and says it was exhilarating.

She needed a chaperone.īrooks' five-week trip is the basis of Lawrence novelist Laura Moriarty's 2012 book 'The Chaperone,' which has now been made into a movie of the same name.

When Kansas-born actress and dancer Louise Brooks wanted to travel to New York City in 1922 at the age of 15, she could not go alone.

The chaperone movie 2019