Born June 23, 1957 in Chicago, Frances Louise McDormand is an American film and stage actress. She has starred in a number of films, including her Academy Award-winning performances in Good People as Margie Walsh, having been nominated for the same category in 1988 for the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Canadian Minister Vernan McDormand and his wife Noreen, a registered nurse and receptionist adopted Frances and raised her in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. She has said that her biological mother may have been one of the parishioners at Vernan’s church. She has a sister, Dorothy A. McDormand, who is an ordained Disciples of Christ minister and chaplain, as well as another sibling, both of whom were adopted by the McDormands, who had no biological children. As her father specialized in restoring congregations, he frequently moved their family, and they lived in several small towns in Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, before settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area town of Monessen. She earned her B.A. in Theatre from Bethany College in 1979. In 1982, McDormand earned an M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Drama.
Her first professional acting job was in Trinidad and Tobago, performing in a play written by poet (and Nobel laureate) Derek Walcott and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. McDormand’s film debut was in Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, 1984′s Blood Simple. She married filmmaker Joel Coen that year. In 1985, McDormand, the Coen brothers, Holly Hunter, and director Sam Raimi shared a house in The Bronx. In 1987, she appeared as the wacky neighbor Dot in the hit film Raising Arizona, starring Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage.
Early film roles included McDormand playing Connie Chapman in the fifth season of the television police drama Hill Street Blues. In 1988, she played Stella Kowalski in a stage production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award. McDormad is an associate member of the experimental theater company The Wooster Group. McDormand appeared in several theatrical and television roles during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress three times for her performances in Mississippi Burning, Almost Famous, and North Country, and has also been nominated for four Golden Globes, three BAFTA Awards, and an Emmy Award.
McDormand starred in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the sequel to the hit film, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. She played the US government’s National Intelligence Director, alongside Burn After Reading co-star John Malkovich. She has returned to the stage in the David Lindsay-Abaire play Good People, in a limited engagement on Broadway from February 8, 2011 to May 29, 2011. Her performance garnered her a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Play. Frances McDormand also participates as a member of the Jury for the NYICFF, a local New York City Film Festival dedicated to screening films for children between the ages of 3 and 18.
McDormand has been married to director Joel Coen since 1984, and the two adopted a son from Paraguay, Pedro McDormand Coen, in 1994. They live in New York City. McDormand has starred in six of the Coen Brothers films, including a minor appearance in Miller’s Crossing, a secondary role in Raising Arizona and lead roles in Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Fargo, for which she won an Academy Award, and more recently Burn After Reading. Additionally, she contributed an unaccredited offscreen (voice only) appearance to the opening scene in the Coens’ Barton Fink.
Frances McDormand Photo Gallery
