Vaulting Ambition

After her (very) featured player turn in the lauded new Alan Parker film “Mississippi Burning,” Frances McDormand might just graduate from the supporting ranks and start playing leading roles.

All that career movement’s fine by her--”I do want to be a working actress, after all,” she says--but what would really signify her arrival, she thinks, is to play Lady Macbeth.

“Doing that part in New York would represent to me my real success as an actress,” said the 31-year-old McDormand, who learned her acting skills at Yale’s vaunted drama school and then “played the provinces” for several years thereafter.

“Leaving aside the difficulty of the role and its demands . . . when an American actress is allowed to play a Shakespearean lead in New York, that usually means she’s exposed enough--and, you hope, good enough--to take the part away from a British actress. And that would mean a lot to me.”

The pivotal character of Mrs. Pell in “Mississippi Burning” meant a lot to McDormand as well. Though she credits playing Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire” on Broadway with perfecting her Southernness, the mostly Midwestern McDormand did a lot of reading and talking with women in rural Alabama to get a fix on her role.

“In a way she grows more than anyone else in the film,” McDormand says. “She realizes her way of life is changing, but she’s a good woman who stands by her man, even if he’s in the (Ku Klux) Klan. She comes to see evil in her town, where she grew up, and that’s not an easy thing to deal with.”

But thanks to Mrs. Pell, it might be a bit easier for McDormand to deal with being recognized in restaurants and suchlike.

“The next task,” says the diminutive blond actress, “is to convince people in the business that (a) I’m not Southern and (b) I can wear high heels--and look good in them. And then can come Lady Macbeth.”