Broadway's Sally Bowles, Law & Order's first female detective and a Dick Wolf director says Norman gave her everything she needed to leave and a reason to keep coming back.
When Milena Govich made her first film as a director, she didn't shoot it in Los Angeles or Atlanta, where she was working. She went home to Keith Street.
It was 2016. She had spent most of two decades as a Broadway performer and television actress, and she shot her first short, Temporary, at her mother's house and a few homes on the same block, with Oklahoma actors and a mostly local crew. That is how she tells her whole story: as a series of doors that opened in Cleveland County.
"I lived my whole life on Keith Street in Norman," she says. "And my mom still lives there to this day. Same house."
A House Full of Music
Her father, Dr. Bruce Govich, came to Norman as a professor at the University of Oklahoma. For 22 years, anyone in the stands at a home football game heard his operatic bass-baritone sing the national anthem. Her mother, Marilyn, grew up in Marlow, came to OU to study and met him there. She later taught voice at the University of Central Oklahoma.
"There were voice lessons in my living room," Milena said. "There were musicians around all the time."
Her first stage role came at OU. She was five, playing the littlest princess in The King and I, and she turned six during the run. She and her two younger brothers took turns going to games and going on the field with their father.
"When he went out to sing, we would get left on the sideline with the football players. You go back to fourth grade, and you're a rock star."
The Public School Advantage
In fifth grade at Lincoln Elementary, she came home and announced she wanted to play violin. Her parents said yes, as they did to nearly everything she wanted to try. She credits the district's strings program.
"It's one of the best strings programs in the country," she said.
She kept playing through Irving Middle School and into the Oklahoma Youth and All-State Orchestras.
She also studied ballet with Marjorie Kovich, who still has a studio in Norman. By her early teens she was dancing about 20 hours a week and performing with the Norman Ballet Company at the Sooner Theatre.
"I know that beautiful old building so well," she says. "I have so many great memories, and maybe some performance-anxiety nightmares."
At Norman High School, then the town's only high school, she found a faculty that was hard to match. "You're getting a level of education in a public school that is not usual," she says. She graduated valedictorian. Not once, but twice. Some of her closest friends are still here in her hometown.
She’s never not been busy. "When you're a kid, it's soccer one year and tennis the next," she says. "My version of that was that I just never quit anything. I just kept adding."
Leaving With a Plan
She chose the University of Central Oklahoma for a simple reason: to study voice with her mom. She earned a degree in vocal performance while completing a pre-med track, with minors in dance and violin. UCO let her build what she calls a "choose your own adventure college experience," bending her schedule so she could fit dance classes, chemistry labs and performances into one semester. She graduated valedictorian again.
At 22, she decided medical school could wait. "I'm going to go all in on performing," she remembers thinking, "and I'm going to do it as long as I love it."
She moved to New York in January of 2000. Her mother drove her to Dallas for the one-way flight, and she carried two suitcases and her violin. A room was waiting with one of her mother's former students. She had watched her parents' students try the same leap, and some did not survive it.
"I didn't come starry-eyed," she says. "I knew how hard it was going to be."
She felt as ready as she could, though. The logical next step, she says, "would be to jump into the bigger pool."
Her first Broadway job was the legendary Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall revival of Cabaret at Studio 54. The actors were also the band, playing their instruments on stage eight shows a week. One number, the ballad "Married," calls for a violinist to walk out on a catwalk in a spotlight and play a solo.
"So I'm this kid from Oklahoma who shows up," she says. "I have 20 years of ballet training, I can sing a high C, and do you want to hear my violin?"
Before she had played a single Broadway performance, she was offered the understudy for the lead role of Sally Bowles. She stayed about a year and a half and went on as Sally more than 80 times by her own count.
"It was one of the greatest experiences of my life," she says.
Television followed. She had a recurring role on Rescue Me, then a lead in Dick Wolf's Conviction. The day after NBC canceled it, she says, Wolf called and offered her Law & Order without an audition. In 2006 and 2007, she played Detective Nina Cassady, the first and still only female detective on the original series.
What Oklahoma Taught Her About Work
Asked how she rose from actor to one of Wolf's directors, Milena points back to her mother and her hometown.
"My whole career has been built on relationships," she says. "I feel like my upbringing in Oklahoma, and especially my mother, prepared me for that. It's greeting people with kindness, giving the benefit of the doubt and really effective communication."
Her move behind the camera came while she was acting on Finding Carter in Atlanta. She got permission to shadow the show's directors for an entire season, a privilege she did not take lightly. Then she made Temporary, which earned her a place in the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women, and a second short, Unspeakable, which premiered at South by Southwest. Both were written by her husband, David Cornue. She had her confidence in directing. She took them to Wolf's company and asked for a job directing Chicago Med. She got it.
She has served as a co-executive producer on FBI, and has become trusted with network producers.
"People can trust that I'm always going to find a way forward," she said.
Coming Home, On and Off Screen
Through friends of friends, she was introduced to an Oklahoma filmmaking community she hadn't known existed, and that summer she attended the deadCenter Film Festival for the first time. She has been involved ever since. She teaches summer workshops at deadCenter University, four films she directed or produced have screened at the festival, and in 2024 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Movie Hall of Fame.
She looks forward to watching the festival's Okie Shorts program every year.
Her biggest hope is to shoot a series in the state. "That's the pie-in-the-sky version," she says. "For David and me to come back home, have a series and employ people for 10 months out of the year, not 10 weeks."
When She's Home
She lives in Los Angeles but works everywhere. When she visits Norman, she walks the OU campus to see what has changed and orders barbecue from Van's Pig Stand. She never skips Braum's. "I rarely eat ice cream," she says, "but when I'm home, there's Braum's, and I'll take any flavor you'll give me."
Someday, she would like to return to the stage. "What I miss the most is the stage and singing," she says. "That's where I started."
"I'm very, very bullish on Oklahoma, I think everything's trending in the right direction. Every time I come home, it's better and better," Govich said.