FRANCES McDORMAND
Date of Birth: June 23, 1957
Adopted by Canadian-born minister Vernon McDormand and his wife, Noreen,
Frances McDormand was raised in Monessen, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in Theater from Bethany College in West Virginia and attended Yale University's School of Drama, where she was awarded the Carol Dye prize for Excellence. It would be the first of many awards for McDormand.
She sees herself as "... a character actress, plain and simple. Who can worry about a career? Have a life! Movie stars have careers. Actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again."
McDormand will long be remembered for her Academy Award-winning performance as Marge, the pregnant police chief in
Fargo (1996), directed by her real life husband,
Joel Coen. She will also be remembered for her Best Supporting Actress nominations for
Mississippi Burning (1988),
Almost Famous (2000) and
North Country (2005). She also won Best Actress at the Gijon International Film Festival for
Laurel Canyon (2002). McDormand often performs on stage, and in 2011, won a Tony award for her work in the Broadway play
Good People.
Although constantly in demand, she feels she's known as an actor, not a star—and likes it that way: "I have friends who are movie stars," she says. "And I think it's just as hard a job as being a working actor. But it's a different job, and it's not the one I want."
Some of McDormand's recent film titles include
Friends With Money (2006),
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) and
Moonrise Kingdom (2012).
She and her husband have two children.