Frances McDormand Wears Her Love of Character Roles as a Badge of Honor : An Arresting Personality

Although the role was written expressly for her, Frances McDormand initially had mixed feelings about playing the part of stalwart Marge Gunderson, a small-town Minnesota police chief, in the comically serious film “Fargo,” which opened Friday.

Gunderson, who is six months pregnant and devoted to husband Norm, a painter of mallard ducks, wakes up one morning to find she has a triple homicide to solve.

She does so, capably, waddling through a host of grisly crime scenes emitting the local trademark “Yaas,” “Alrightys” and “You betchas.”

“When I first read it, I did not see what I eventually found out working on the character and then seeing the final movie,” McDormand, 38, says.

Complicating the situation was that the part of Gunderson was written by McDormand’s real-life husband, Joel Coen, and his brother Ethan, who also directed and produced the film.

“I had bit of consternation,” McDormand says. “Like, ‘Why me? Why am I Marge? Are you telling me something here?’ ”

What the filmmaking Coens were likely telling her was that given her status as a widely admired character actor, she could easily inhabit the role of Gunderson, as she ultimately did.

“I kind of got the sense that she was the white hat, but I was amazed at how funny people thought Marge was,” McDormand says, recalling a screening for family and friends. “Clearly, she’s visually funny. Her behavior’s funny, but I couldn’t play it comedic. Unless it’s a flat-out farce, an actor can’t play comedy on film. I did the old drama school rule of comedy: Just be true to the character’s behavior, and if it’s supposed to be funny, it will be. You just have to play the character.”

And play the character she has, in a career that has spanned about a dozen movies since she graduated from Yale Drama School. McDormand made her debut as an adulterous wife in the Coens’ first feature, the grisly film noir drama “Blood Simple.”

She has also appeared in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts,” Sam Raimi’s “Dark Man,” John Boorman’s “Beyond Rangoon” and Alan Parker’s “Mississippi Burning,” for which she received an Oscar nomination and won the National Board of Review award for best supporting actress. She was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1988 for her role as Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Audiences may know her face but don’t have the same expectations of her that they might of a bigger film star, McDormand says. And that’s just the way she likes it.

Besides “Fargo,” she has four films coming out this year: in the spring, “Primal Fear” with Richard Gere and “Lone Star,” directed by John Sayles; later in the year, “Palookaville” and “Talk of Angels.”

She proudly identifies herself as a character actor, having evolved into it after wanting to be a classical stage actor.

“The last thing I wanted to do was play someone like Marge when I was in my 20s,” McDormand says. “I wanted to be exotic.”

For the role of Gunderson, McDormand wore padding to simulate her pregnant state, while in reality she and Coen were in the midst of adopting a baby from Paraguay. Pedro McDormand Coen is now 16 months old and his parents are taking Spanish lessons.

“I wanted to be able to tell him I love him and what he means to me in Spanish, since that was the language he heard for the first six months,” McDormand says.

She segues comfortably between discussions of acting and the challenges of parenthood.

“A movie set actually can be a good place to have a family atmosphere,” she says. “I had done a one-day job for a film I had planned before we met Pedro. It was John Sayles’ new movie, ‘Lone Star,’ and he’s a friend, so it was like family. Pedro and I went down to Texas and I worked one day and was completely sleep-deprived because Pedro had a cold and had been up all night. But it was perfect for the character because she was a heavily narcotized football fanatic who just kind of babbled.”

She prefers to star in independent films, though she does find it “comfortable” acting in more traditional Hollywood fare.

“Independent films just offer me a diversity that I haven’t found in mainstream movies,” she says.

Not many mainstream movies would have a scene like one near the end of “Fargo.” While investigating a kidnapping ransom scheme gone bloodily awry, McDormand as Police Chief Gunderson scolds the murderous Gaear Grimsrud, played by Peter Stormare, responsible for half a dozen local murders. A grim, gray snow-covered landscape surrounds them and Gunderson tells him, with her trademark common sense: “There’s more to life than a little bit of money, ya know? Dontcha know that? And here you are and it’s a beautiful day. . . . I just don’t understand it.”

After her initial trepidation, McDormand launched into playing Gunderson with gusto, studying under a dialect coach to perfect a lilting Minnesota accent. (She was born in Illinois and raised in several Southern states and Pennsylvania.)

And she fell smoothly into working with her husband again, in her first lead role on a Coen-made movie after nearly a dozen years.

“I was just excited about getting to work with them again,” McDormand says. “The shoot was really easy, because that’s how we met. It wasn’t like we were lovers first and then we worked together. The original contract of our relationship was built on a working collaboration which has served us very well as life partners.”