Frances McDormand, happy crone
In this rare interview Fargo actress Frances McDormand opens up about growing older, her adopted son and her marriage to filmmaker Joel Coen
HER latest role as angry, funny, foul-mouthed Mildred Hayes in the film Three Billboards Out s ide Ebbi n g , Missouri, is a serious Oscar contender. Acclaimed actress Frances McDormand is less hard-ass in real life, although she does like to do things on her own terms, as she explains in this interview.
IT’S the thing that many actresses dread: getting old, being considered over the hill and past their sell-by date. But Frances McDormand isn’t scared – in fact, she’s looking forward to letting nature take its course.
“A friend told me there are three stages of a woman’s life – maid, mother, crone,” the actress says. “Crone has been taken away from us, and I want it back.”
In a looks-obsessed Hollywood, Frances is like a breath of fresh air. Having just recently turned 60 she views the wear and tear of age as a badge of honour.
“The culture of ageism has not let us [women] go past 45. A crone is a sage and has wisdom, and is there for emergency situations.
“But if you can’t identify us, if we look just like you – well, that’s one of the reasons we’re such an undeveloped and immature culture. Everybody’s arresting themselves at a certain age.”
So here we are in a London hotel with her filmmaker husband Joel Coen lurking inconclusively in the background. From the lobby I’d earlier watched him unable to decide whether to walk up the stairs or down, like a lost soul from one of the films he makes with his brother Ethan.
Frances doesn’t look lost. She looks fit, well groomed, less than 60 – but not artificially less – and nothing like the hard-assed women she so often plays. Also unlike them, she’s dressed with cool, urban chic. She’d been hard to pin down – she does very few interviews – but, to my relief, she shows up and turns out to be talkative and frank.
She’s very preoccupied by the issue of age. She had a year-long “full-on conflict” with director Martin McDonagh about her age in his film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which sees her giving one of the best performance of her career as Mildred Hayes, a mother who’s grieving the rape and murder of her daughter. She initially told McDonagh she was too old to play the mother of a teen: she should be her grandmother.
“I know women from this socio-economic stratum of America, and they don’t have children at that age. But he said he didn’t believe a grandmother would fight that hard for her grandchild, and I said, ‘Yes, they would.’ This went on for about a year, then finally Joel said, ‘Just shut up and do it – if he thinks you’re not too old, then you’re not too old.’ ”
She effectively commissioned this film. Twelve years ago, she saw McDonagh’s play The Pillowman on Broadway and, uncharacteristically, went to the after-show party.
“He said, ‘I know you would be good in one of my plays.’ I said, ‘I hear you’re making films – you should write me a part.’ And, lo and behold, he did. I’ve only ever said that to two other people, Joel and Ethan. I say it every couple of years.”
She does drag work out of the Coens occasionally; after all, she’s married to one of them. Most famously, she landed the Oscar-winning role of Marge Gunderson in Fargo, a film so powerful, so perfect and so memorable that she’s still stopped in the streets 22 years on and asked to do the Marge accent.
A decade after the Broadway party, McDonagh sent her Three Billboards. Her powerhouse portrayal of Mildred, who’s angry, funny, foul-mouthed and prone to startling acts of violence, has already earned her a Golden Globe for best actress and she’s being widely tipped to take home an Oscar this year.
What drew her to McDonagh was, among other things, his taut scripting. “The majority of scripts I see are just blueprints with visual aids attached. I’m always asked to fill in a lot of blanks.”
The subject of bad writing immediately brings out the angry Mildred in her. “I just watched a film in which a young actor said the same line over and over again – ‘excuse me, excuse me, excuse me!’ I just realised I’ve been asked to do that line, and I’ve come up with variations on what it means. What it really means is, write, f****** write her a line! Track the psychology of the character, give her some words!”
FRANCES was born Cynthia Ann Smith in Illinois, to a mother she once described as “white trash”. She was adopted at 18 months by a pastor, Vernon McDormand, and his wife, Noreen. “I still expect Noreen to come right up out of the grave and tell me to wash my mouth out – how many ‘f***s’ do I say in Three Billboards?” A lot, all subtly different. The line that sticks in the mind is addressed to a TV-show host: “This doesn’t put an end to s**t, you f****** retard. This is just a f****** start. Why don’t you put that on your good morning Missouri f****** broadcast, bitch?”
Vernon was a preacher and the family moved about. Frances was educated in Pennsylvania, went to college in West Virginia and ended up at Yale School of Drama. Only a fierce moral sense survived of her parents’ religion, but she became a surprisingly active pagan. Bear with me.
She married Joel in 1984. They couldn’t have children. “We tried, but nature didn’t come through. This was 25 years ago, infertility was a different thing, and it was kind of like, from a woman’s point of view, becoming a science experiment – and I really didn’t want to become a science experiment. I wanted to become a parent.
“I’d always, always, from early adulthood, wanted to be a mother, and I really yearned for that. It was a physical ache in my groin. But then it shifted to the crook of my elbow, and that’s when I knew that it’s not about being pregnant or giving birth, it’s about holding them either physically or metaphorically for the rest of your life.”
And so, in 1994, they adopted a baby, Pedro, from Paraguay. Which brings me to the paganism. At the kindergarten they celebrated every faith and asked about Pedro’s religion. “I said, ‘Well, I’m raising him a pagan.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you mean like a maypole [the traditional dance around a pole in May which is a fertility rite].’ I said, ‘That sounds good.’
“I wanted us as a family to have something we could all agree on. Joel was raised Jewish and I was raised Protestant. Neither of us followed those religions, but we had sentimental attachments to the best parts. So we celebrate winter solstice and make sun and moon cookies. And for some reason the first time we did it we ate potato gratin and peas, and drank single malt whisky – not Pedro then. Now he does. We also howled at the moon when it was full. We still do. If I see a full moon, you can’t stop me howling.”
Raising Pedro made her frugal with her work. She tried to limit herself to one film and one play a year. Then, as he approached college age, she was stricken with separation anxiety. Luckily, she found distraction in work. She’d been watching the TV series The Wire and had the urge to make her own show. That was Olive Kitteridge, a four-part confrontation with depression and suicide. It was kind of a deadly serious Crone Alone, and Olive was as great a performance as Marge.
“I started work on Olive Kitteridge when Pedro was 16 or 17. Thankfully, it got me through the grief of him leaving for the first time. He hasn’t gone that far. He lives four blocks away from our apartment in New York. I run into him on the street, which is so fantastic.”
Walking with him once, she asked him if she was a good mother. Pedro replied, “Was?” That story chokes her up. Anyway, now he seems to be wavering between being a personal trainer and getting a career in film. “Nepotism is much more attractive at 22 than at 45,” she tells him. She seems to tell the truth as much in life as she does on screen.
THESE days, she says, she’s a tourist in New York. “I go there to do all the things that old ladies do – I go to Wednesday matinees, I have lunch with my friends, I get a pedicure, I see the black hairs coming out on my chin. It’s great, I love it.” But, she adds, she’s a small-town person. “I really need to live the last chapter of my life in a small town, in nature.”
With Joel, she has a house on the coast in the Pacific Northwest. She keeps the location secret and is stunned when I guess the name of the town.
This place is central to her life. She never talks about politics in public, but there she does real local politics. Also, she hikes. “I love to walk, that’s my exercise – no more ‘getting fit’ for roles or trying to fit in some dress.”
It’s working. “This is it. This is what 60 looks like, until tomorrow, when it will look like something different. I do feel really fit. If I can touch the floor and not bend my knees too much, I’m good.”
Frances raised her son as a pagan. ‘If I see a full moon, you can’t stop me howling.’
But the Mystery Town is not just about walking. It’s about authenticity. As she did with grief in Olive Kitteridge, she’s stitching this private aspiration into her public work. She’s now working on a TV series based on The Awakening Land, a Conrad Richter trilogy. It’s about a frontier family in the early 19th century.
“I personally just want to explore playing a character who realises in her lifetime that it’s gone wrong. It’s just on the verge of industrialisation. They’ve cut down all the trees to build this town and, by the time the town has taken hold, she starts planting trees again.”
In her Mystery Town she’s metaphorically planting trees, trying to fix the depredations of modernity.
“When somebody says to me ‘I’m an anxious person’, I say that’s a general condition of human behaviour. We’re all suffering from anxiety, we’re all suffering from mania, depression, because we’re not working. The human animal was created to work. It’s a machine, and the fuel we’re putting in the machine is all wrong.
“We do nothing with our bodies, we have to make up activities for the machine – that’s why there are gyms on every corner.”
Her character, she says, does everything. “You wake up in the morning and you survive until you fall asleep. You get just enough sleep to wake up in the morning and do it all again. That is life worth living, and the minute she’s idle she starts to question her existence.”
Yet she says that, from experience and from discussions with Joel, she has learnt that the only power an actor has is the power to say no: “No to the job, no to the system, no to the stereotyping. But enough no’s equals no work, so you’ve got to throw in a few yeses to get the work.
“I’m trying to evolve my position to the point where I do just enough to make it possible to do more work.
“I also believe that I can be a voice and a model for other women – and men – on how to have longevity in a really compromising profession.”
We part, and I get two kisses – two more than usual. Perhaps it was to seal the secret of Mystery Town.
She needn’t have bothered. For how could I ever betray the Greatest Living Crone? © BRYAN APPLEYARD/ THE SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE MAGAZINE/NEWS SYNDICATION
SThree Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri opens in SA cinemas on 23 February.