Elizabeth McGovern Reveals Why She Ended Her Relationship With Sean Penn

In the early 1980s, Sean Penn and Elizabeth McGovern developed a relationship off screen while they were filming Racing To The Moon.

The couple didn’t last, and Elizabeth, who plays Lady Cora in Downton Abbey, has opened up about why she decided to end things with the Oscar winner.

Click inside to read more…

Speaking to Daily Mail, Elizabeth shared that she felt they were on different paths in life.

“There’s a road I could have taken, but I decided to call it off. It just felt like we were on different tracks,” she explained. “We were only in our early 20s. It would have been nothing short of a miracle had that become a lifelong partnership because we were both really young and figuring out who we were.”

Elizabeth also described her relationship with Sean as “exhausting”.

“It was the frenzy of Sean’s feelings that overwhelmed me,” she shared. “It was also the first real experience of boys I’d had, which was kind of nice. “In the beginning it was fun. We were a similar age and in the same place professionally, so we were experiencing everything together.”

Elizabeth added, “It was so exhausting, I couldn’t sustain it. We also wanted to do different things. He likes to pretend he’s not really a Hollywood person, but he is.”

Sean went on to marry Madonna in 1985, and then Robin Wright in 1996. He’s currently going through his third split with Leila George.

For Elizabeth, she moved to England in 1992, where she married director Simon Curtis.

FYI: Sean is pictured below running some errands earlier in the week in Los Angeles.