FRANCES MCDORMAND
The uncompromising star of Fargo and Three Billboards has followed her own path to the top.
When director Joel Coen asked Frances McDormand to read for a lead role in 1984’s Blood Simple, she initially demurred because she had to watch her boyfriend at the time make his TV-acting debut on a soap opera. The audition was rescheduled, and Frances landed the part. “That’s why I got the job,” she explains. “Because I said no.”
Frances didn’t decline when Joel proposed marriage to her, and after 33 years together they’re still going strong. But the star, who’s the front-runner to win this year’s best actress Oscar for her powerful turn as a grieving mother in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, has learned the power of “no” as she’s refused to settle for less than the best on her road to the top. “She’s incapable of making compromises — it’s not in her DNA,” Richard Jenkins, her co-star in the 2014 HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, tells Closer. “There are no airs. She is who she is, and it’s fantastic.”
The 60-year-old came by her toughness early in life. At the age of 1, she was fostered then adopted by an itinerant pastor and his wife, and as a teen, when she was given the opportunity to meet her birth mother, she passed it up. She’s since carved out a career playing tough, complex women, like her Oscarwinning performance as a pregnant police chief in 1996’s Fargo, directed by Joel and brother Ethan Coen. “She’s a pretty strongwilled person,” says Three Billboards co-star Sam Rockwell. “She doesn’t take any s---.”
For her tragicomic Three Billboards role, Frances drew on her own experience raising son Pedro, whom she adopted when he was 6 months old in 1995. “As a mother, you live on the edge of disaster,” she recalls. “From the minute I held him and smelled him, I knew it was my job to keep him alive. As a parent, you come to see the worry and anxiety that goes along with protecting someone.”
Although she also earned Oscar nods for Mississippi Burning, Almost Famous and North Country, Frances has never played the fame game. “She’s all about making the work as good as it can be,” says Richard. “And she’s at a place in her life where there’s no stopping her.”
With 24-year-old Pedro working as a personal trainer as well as a crew member on his father’s films, Frances can continue to focus on her career. “I’m not really interested in playing supporting roles anymore,” she says. “There are women we don’t often see portrayed in film — women who don’t have to be compromised for the storytelling of a male protagonist but who stand on their own. That’s really important to me. I’m really interested in that now.”
— Bruce Fretts
THE OSCAR WINNER TAKES AN UNCONVENTIONAL
PATH TO THE PINNACLE OF HER PROFESSION
ALMOST FAMOUS