'Ava: The Secret Conversations' actor plays all male characters in downtown Chicago show

CHICAGO (WLS) -- "Ava: The Secret Conversations" is a hit at the Studebaker Theater. It's about a screen legend whose real life was as thrilling as the movies she starred in.

Elizabeth McGovern plays Ava Gardner. Aaron Costa Ganis plays the journalist she enlisted to write her story.

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Gardner hired Peter Evans to write her biography.

But he came from the tabloids, and Gardner didn't want to "tell all" and fired him.

"We start the play where she's just basically had a stroke, and she needs to very literally pay the mortgage on her apartment in London," Costa Ganis said. "You're meeting her after her prime in a way, and after the cameras have sort of like moved away. And then you're saying, 'so now what?' She's asking the same question."

Costa Ganis plays all the men in the play.

"I start out playing a British journalist. And then, 15 minutes into the play, I'm kind of moving into a 21-year-old Mickey Rooney," Costa Ganis said. "It's a different time, where everybody was a dancer, and a singer and an actor, and they could do everything. And he was so casual with his skill that it's kind of like, 'how do you do that?'"

Costa Ganis also talked about becoming Frank Sinatra.

"It's hard to get into somebody who's like got this big bravado. But it's much easier to get into like a guy who's struggling, who's in love, but who's making mistakes. And he's feeling the pressures," he said. "His career is at a low. Her career, Ava's career, is at a high. And we meet them as he's basically playing second fiddle to her life and her career. They were both so mad for each other. There were so many things going on in their separate worlds that they just couldn't, they couldn't do it. I think the story of this Hollywood starlet who ages is interesting. If you don't know much about old Hollywood and about these like femme fatales from Hollywood's glory days, you do get a sense of sort of what that landscape was like. And also the question is asked in the play, where do I go from here?"

Sinatra stayed in touch with Gardner, even after he married other women.

He even tried to convince her to move back to Los Angeles for treatment of her medical problems before her death.

"Ava: The Secret Conversations" is at the Studebaker Theater through this Sunday.