Frances Louise McDormand was the leading lady in the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo. She was born in 1957 in Chicago. A Canadian Disciples of Christ Minister by the name of Vernan McDormand and his housewife Noreen adopted and raised her in the suburbs of Pittsburgh; Monessen, Pennsylvania. She was the youngest of three adopted McDormand children.
Frances earned a bachelor’s in Theater from Bethany College in 1979 and a Master’s from Yale’s School of Drama in 1982. Her career started in theater, but she soon obtained prominent roles in movies with the first starring role being Blood Simple in 1984. She ended up marrying the filmmaker later that year, Joel Coen. Since, she has frequently collaborated with her husband and his brother, Ethan Coen, in their films. She once lived in an apartment with Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Sam Raimi, Scott Spiegal and Holly Hunter. Frances and Joel have one adopted son, Pedro, who was born in Paraguay, 1994.
Despite winning critical acclaim for her performance in Blood Simple, it would be four years, until a cameo in the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona (1987) and other various small roles, before she would be featured in another major film production. In the meatime, McDormand’s stage career flourished, and she received a Tony nomination for the 1987 Broadway production of ‘A Streetcar named Desire’. She also did periodic television work, co-starring on the short lived detective drama Legwork (1987) and appeared in a recurring role on Hill Street Blues.
In addition to many critics' awards, she has been nominated for an Academy Award four times - Mississippi Burning (1988), Fargo (1996), for which she won the Best Actress Award, Almost Famous (2000) and North Country (2005). Keenly intelligent and possessed of a sharp wit, McDormand is the opposite of the Hollywood starlet - rather than making every role about Frances McDormand, Frances McDormand dissolves into the characters she plays. Accordingly, she has expressed some reservations about the iconic recognition she has gained from her touching and amusing portrayal of Police Chief Marge Gunderson in Fargo.
Her Oscar-winning role in Fargo as Marge Gunderson was ranked #33 in the American Film Institute's Heroes list in their 100 years of The Greatest Screen Heroes and Villains, and is ranked #27 on Premiere Magazine’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters of all Time
Recently she has worked in Madagascar 3 (2012), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon (2011) and Burn After Reading (2008).
Information gathered on www.imdb.com and www.fandango.com
I liked having a different kind of Leading Lady for this film. Very different kind. As in she goes out to get the dough, and the husband cooks and paints. Awesome. I was thinking...how would we have felt about this leading lady had she not been pregnant? I think the pregnancy added something to her...in the end. The whole comment about "two more months" and looking to the future and its possibilities. No matter who does that cooking, I think that kid is destined to grow up "all right" with a mom that just "doesn't understand it" when it comes to the obscene things people do for money. Definitely a hero in my mind.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think the pregnancy added to her role of being somewhat of a female hero in this film. She made no excuses at all throughout the movie, even though she had every right to. She was the one getting called early in the morning to the scene of the crime, and her husband cooked her breakfast and painted. She was also very kind, optimistic, and supportive of her husband throughout the film.
ReplyDeleteI really liked Frances Mcdormand in this movie. I found her to be the most sympathetic character out of any movie we have watched. Conversely, I found William H. Macy's character the most pathetic character of just about any movie I have every watched. He was so unlikeable, it made it hard to enjoy the movie.
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