MARY STEENBURGEN
THE STAR OVERCAME A DARK CHILDHOOD TO FIND HAPPINESS WITH TED DANSON AND AS A MOM OF TWO
How she overcame trauma to find happiness later in life.
Even before they met, Ted Danson could lift Mary Steenburgen’s spirits. “I always thought Ted was brilliant,” the star told Closer after a recent SAG-AFTRA Foundation screening of her new film Dean. “When I was going through sad times, I’d watch Cheers at the end of the day to make me feel better. Then I discovered it was easier to just sleep with Sam the bartender,” she joked.
As a child, Mary had learned to escape sadness — and severe trauma — by getting lost in stories. “My dad had a series of heart attacks when I was a little girl, and our world was shaped by these huge traumatic events,” says the Arkansas native, 64. “I spent my childhood waiting for my dad to die. From the age of 8, my response to that insanity was to bury myself in books, where if people died, they could get back up again.”
Miraculously, Mary’s father lived until 1989, so he was able to see her succeed on the big screen — and honor him. After director Jack Nicholson plucked her from obscurity to co-star with him in the 1978 Western Goin’ South, Mary was pressured by studio execs to change her last name to Bergen. “I thought about Maurice Steenburgen, a freight-train conductor from North Little Rock, Arkansas, who thought I was the most magical thing in the world just by being a waitress in New York,” Mary recalls. “There was no way I was not going to have his name.”
When Mary won a best supporting actress Oscar for 1980’s Melvin and Howard, her family still came first. “I had Lilly, my first child, two and a half months before that,” she says of her older child with ex-husband Malcolm McDowell (see page 68). “I was so crazy in love with my daughter that it slightly eclipsed the Oscar — which in Hollywood is an almost sacrilegious thing to say.”
Lilly, now 36, followed her mother into acting but has been spending more time lately as a mom — she’s expecting Mary’s third granddaughter. Son Charlie, 33, has become a filmmaker and recently directed Mary opposite Robert Redford in the Netflix film The Discovery. “I didn’t want to let Charlie down or annoy him by talking about how cute, smart and sweet he is,” she beams. “And somehow I pushed the tears down — I deserve some sort of award for that.”
Although she also acted with her teenage crush Robert on 2015’s A Walk in the Woods, Mary still picks Ted, 69, as her favorite leading man; married since 1995, they’ll soon reprise their roles as themselves on Larry David’s HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. And that’s not their only sitcom gig. “I shoot [Fox’s] The Last Man on Earth from August to February, and Ted shoots [NBC’s] The Good Place from February to August, so there’s never a time when we’re both free,” says Mary. “We help each other learn lines every night.” Cheers to that! — Bruce Fretts
EVERYTHING’S RELATIVE “I love working with Ted because he’s ridiculously talented.” — Mary