Staying in Character

Actresses who win an Oscar usually move swiftly to capitalize on their success. With their agents they seek high-profile, lucrative screen roles to ride the wave of their new-found visibility. For who knows how long it will last? Acting is precarious, especially for women; this year’s hot face easily becomes next year’s “remember her?”

That’s how most Oscar-winning actresses react to their triumph. Frances McDormand, it’s fair to say, follows another path entirely.

Last year she held aloft her Academy Award for best actress, given for her extraordinary performance in the Coen brothers’ film “Fargo” as Marge Gunderson, the heavily pregnant, shrewd but slow-talking (“you betcha!”) police chief in rural Minnesota.

McDormand effectively stole the Oscar show that night with her determined stride on and off stage, and for a hugely articulate acceptance speech in which she congratulated Working Title and PolyGram, the companies backing “Fargo,” for “allowing directors to make autonomous casting decisions based on qualifications and not just market value.”

But consider what offers of work McDormand has accepted since winning that Oscar. Here’s a hint: She won’t be showing up playing anyone’s mom in this year’s crop of high-budget summer action movies.

* She agreed to play Blanche Dubois in the classic Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on stage, far away from Hollywood--in Ireland, at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, where it just closed.

* McDormand also opted to take a role as a department store clerk in a “Sesame Street” video for children, “Big Bird Gets Lost.”

* She accepted another stage role, off-off-Broadway, in a reworking of the Oedipus myth by playwright Dare Clubb, an old friend from Yale Drama School.

* Her one film role is playing the kindly nun Miss Clavel in “Madeline,” the recently released adaptation of the classic children’s book by Ludwig Bemelmans. She teaches and cares for “the 12 little girls in two straight lines” at a private boarding school in Paris.

And as McDormand points out, even Miss Clavel is essentially “a supporting role. It’s just that I’m taller than everyone else.”

Why is “Madeline” the only film she has taken on since her big Oscar night? “It was the best choice I could have made. I hadn’t done a play in five years, so I specifically chose to go back to theater. I needed to balance my professional life against something that was out of my hands.

“The only control I have is to choose to do the work I want to do, not to follow the Academy Award with something that’s predescribed for someone who wins an Academy Award. There’s always that sense of anticipation: What will she do next?

“I cashed that in by playing Blanche. I’m not the traditional idea of the character, and our interpretation of the play was a success. As for the ‘Sesame Street’ video, it’s part of a series that helps kids negotiate life. If they get lost, what do they do? I had a certain profile, so I was asked to do it, and it was really satisfying. It was something that concerned me, and it helped teach my 3-year-old son to learn his phone number.”

She mused over all this over lunch at a Chinese restaurant within a five-star London hotel. McDormand, 41, entered with her customary feisty stride, apparently reveling in her arresting appearance--red shoes and a lime-green outfit by Dublin designer Lainey Keogh. She is taller than one might expect from seeing her on screen, but every bit as forthright and humorous. She asked permission to smoke, and rather than picking fastidiously at her food like some actresses, attacked it with relish: “Mmmm!” she exclaimed between mouthfuls. “This is heaven!”

She’s a lot of fun, then, and seems refreshingly unimpressed by the trappings of success. Indeed, McDormand has long insisted she does not trust fame and celebrity, preferring to regard herself as a character actress.

“I’m trying to use the clout [of the Oscar] in my way, not someone else’s prescribed way,” she insisted. “By saying I’m a character actor and that I play supporting roles on film, I’m not being self-deprecating. That’s my agenda--because character actors work until they decide not to work. Leading woman can work for ever on stage, but they have peaks and valleys in film work. By saying this is what I am, I have control.”

Certainly her characters have been memorable. Marge Gunderson in “Fargo” might have finally made her a household name. But McDormand also stood out in two earlier Coen brothers movies: in “Blood Simple,” as Abby, an adulterous wife being hunted down by a murderous private eye; and in “Raising Arizona,” as Dot, a shrill vulgarian offering Holly Hunter child-rearing advice. She was also notable (and Oscar-nominated) as a meek Southern woman abused by her Klansman husband in “Mississippi Burning,” and as an addled football fanatic in John Sayles’ “Lone Star.”

Viewed from this perspective, Miss Clavel in “Madeline” was an intriguing character to play: “Because of the habit she wears, all the acting is in the face. It’s like clown work, it’s theatrical, it’s all in the eyebrows. I dyed my eyebrows darker, and wore a minimum of makeup, just enough to cover skin blemishes. After the makeup tests, there was concern about how prominent my eyebrows were. But I knew they had to be prominent.” “ ‘Madeline’ is magic,” she added. “It’s a simple story. And it’s not patronizing to kids. [Director] Daisy [Mayer] did a great job. She set up the set so it was comfortable for children and conducive to play.”

McDormand suffered few of the problems often encountered by working on sets with child actors, but noted: “The fact 13 children were there kept things in perspective. There weren’t a lot of unnecessary takes. Everybody kept a certain brevity.” She struck up a warm relationship with the 10-year-old English girl Hatty Jones, making her acting debut in the title role (see accompanying story).

“Madeline” may seem an off-center choice for an actress who has just won an Oscar. But, she said, “it was the only [film script] I got that captured my imagination. Obviously now things have changed for me, and I have more options. But ‘Madeline’ came along at just the right moment.

“I was ready to work again, I responded to the script and the story. I loved the character of Miss Clavel. As a location, you can’t pooh-pooh Paris. It was a good time for all the family to go and spend time together. I also knew that for most of this year I’d be working in theater, so it was nice to be able to work in a film like that. It was all serendipitous.”

But there’s yet another reason McDormand agreed to appear in “Madeline.” Since she and her husband, director Joel Coen, adopted their son Pedro from Paraguay, she has been watching several children’s films and videos. “There are different aspects to these videos for parents,” she reflected. “We use them to get a half-hour break. To the negative extreme they become baby-sitters, but realistically it’s a way to distract your child. But I like watching them too, so I respond to ones with good stories.”

*

Her down-to-earth approach to life was fostered in Pennsylvania, where she spent most of her childhood after spells in various small southern towns; her parents are Canadians, and her father is a Protestant pastor. She zeroed in on acting after playing Lady Macbeth in high school and majored in theater at a liberal arts college before progressing to Yale Drama School, emerging in 1982 with a master’s degree.

She moved to New York City, initially sharing an apartment with her friend Holly Hunter, also a Yale graduate. “I was trained as a classical stage actress,” she says now.

But though she found regular work on stage in regional and off-Broadway productions, McDormand soon found films could offer a viable career too. In 1983, Hunter told her she had failed an audition for “these two really weird guys” making their first movie, a low-budget independent effort. These were the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, the film was “Blood Simple,” and she went along to audition, landing the lead role of Abby.

Their meeting was significant. McDormand married Joel Coen, of course. “But I also learned about movies through Joel and Ethan,” she added. “My education was with them.”

And now she insists: “I want to know that whoever I work with knows how to make a movie. I’m not interested in working with directors who are good with actors. That’s a nice thing, a plus, but I’d much rather work with a director role (see accompanying story) who knows what a lens does.

“As an actress I’m in a service position, and it makes it easier to do my job if I know what [the director is] going for.”

Obviously the Coens, who jointly direct their movies, come into this category. “It’s heaven,” says McDormand about working with them. “Their sets are a nice place to be. And their scripts are like plays. You don’t mess with them and you don’t paraphrase. On ‘Fargo,’ if Marge had to say ‘yah’ five times, I said it five times.”

Though closely linked with the Coens, after “Raising Arizona” (1987) she took almost a decade away from their films until “Fargo,” with the minor exception of “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) in which she played a bit part as a secretary for no screen credit.

In that time, she consolidated her career both in films and on stage. On screen she frequently opted for interesting, low-budget work, notably in British director Ken Loach’s politically controversial “Hidden Agenda”--McDormand played a member of a commission investigating civil rights abuses in northern Ireland. Not all the films she chose were critical or commercial successes; few recall “Darkman,” “Passed Away,” “The Butcher’s Wife” or “Chattahoochee” with much affection.

On stage, McDormand made a splash in 1988 on Broadway in the other great female role in “A Streetcar Named Desire”--that of Stanley Kowalski’s abused wife, Stella. Her work brought her a Tony nomination.

“Fargo” and Marge Gunderson, of course, lifted her to a different level in terms of public perception. “Everything Fran did in the film was grounded in reality,” says Joel Coen. “And it worked. People identified with Fran’s character in a way that doesn’t usually happen in our movies.”

McDormand still finds this extraordinary. “When Joel and Ethan raised the money for ‘Fargo,’ they were very clear with financiers,” she said. “They told them they would be lucky if they made their money back. We did the movie and didn’t expect anyone to get it in the same way we did. For American audiences, it was like a foreign movie, set in a place that hasn’t been represented on film.

“So when an audience started forming for it, it took nobody more by surprise than us. It was like: ‘They get it? They’re getting it!’ Not only that, they were telling other people about it. It captured an audience.”

She recalls approaching the Oscars in this same spirit: “We live in New York, so we’re not of the Hollywood community, other than we work in the industry. So that night we were invited guests in someone else’s house. But I got to rearrange the furniture a little bit.”

All this is perfectly consistent with the way McDormand views her whole career. She recalls changing representation six years ago: “I said to my new agent: This is what I want. I had a list of classical stage roles I wanted to do before I got too old: Lady Macbeth, Olga in ‘Three Sisters.’

“I said I didn’t want pilots or TV series. I wanted to do independent films, work with younger directors, and also some of my own generation and older who when they call you just go. So I took a small part in a John Boorman film in Malaysia because it was Boorman. I signed on for ‘Paradise Road’ because Bruce Beresford was directing, and I wanted to work with him.”

It is no surprise that someone so rooted lives like a real person in private. McDormand, Coen and Pedro enjoy a quiet, normal existence on New York’s Upper West Side. She reads. She likes to cook. She has been learning Spanish, partly to help Pedro straddle the heritage of two cultures.

But she also devotes much of her time to the 52nd Street Project, a nonprofit organization in the troubled Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood which introduces local children ages 8 to 18 to the theater world. Volunteers from the stage community help the kids with various activities, such as dance and set design, and some children get to write and perform their own plays.

McDormand is “board chair” of the project: “I have a plastic gavel which squeaks when I hit it on a table,” she said wryly. She has been involved with the project for 13 of the 15 years she has lived in New York.

“I went there as a young actor when I wasn’t working professionally,” she recalled. “It was partly altruistic, but I gained a lot from it too. It gave me a place in the community of New York City. I grew up in rural America, so to choose to live in New York was a commitment. The project made me feel like I belonged, like I had a family. The people I work with there are my closest friends. They’re the people I go home to.”

Such social commitment and determination to be ordinary and private is hardly common among actors, many of whom court publicity constantly and mope disconsolately when “resting” between jobs.

“We’re like overstimulated toddlers,” McDormand says of actors. “For three months at a time we’re bombarded with new sensations. The problem about the job isn’t being employed, but being unemployed. Once you decide to pursue the craft and business of being an actor you assume a certain amount of unemployment. You have to know how to live when you’re not working. It’s easy to feel like nothing when you’re not.”

This could be construed as talking a very good game, yet others confirm this is how McDormand is. “Fran might be in danger of thinking that all this success is more of a corruption than something to celebrate,” Holly Hunter observed last year. “Which is quintessentially Fran.”

For her part, she stresses that she and Joel Coen have a clear understanding about their relationship. “We met on a film set, ‘Blood Simple,’ so there’s no question that I’d ever say, ‘Joel, this is not a good time to make your movie,’ ” she says. “And I’m fortunate to have a partner who knows how important it is for the whole family that I play Blanche Dubois, Miss Clavel, whoever. He knows. He’s known me for 15 years.”

Speaking of which, what are her professional plans once her theater work this year is through? “It’ll be a film,” sighed McDormand. “I’ll be intrigued to see what I do next. Basically I’m looking for a mortgage job, because theater doesn’t even pay the phone bills.” She grimaced. “I need to start pulling my weight again at home.”