(Credits: Far Out / Circle Films)
Sat 8 November 2025 23:30, UK
With three acting Oscars to her name (and one for producing), Frances McDormand’s career could easily beat Katharine Hepburn to posit her as the most successful actor in Academy Award history, with plenty of time to scoop up a few more wins.
It also doesn’t seem like it’s all that hard for her to earn a nomination, having garnered eight since the late 1980s, first getting recognised by the Academy for her performance in Mississippi Burning, and winning, of course, her first for the Coen brothers’ classic 1990s crime film Fargo, truly cementing McDormand as a Hollywood gem.
It seems like acting comes easily to her, but it appears to be something she can switch on and off. As much as she loves her job, she makes sure not to let it consume her to the point of no return, which many stars are certainly guilty of. “I’m a character actress, plain and simple,” she once said, “Who can worry about a career?… Movie stars have careers, actors work, and then they don’t work, and then they work again. You have to get away from the theatre or from the set and live life. If you work constantly from job to job, you’re living in a fantasy world and you have nothing else to offer than fantasy.”
So, with this in mind, McDormand lives her life, preferring to keep out of the spotlight as much as possible, instead showing up to work when she needs to and giving it her all, only to return to herself when the camera stops rolling. Different actors have different techniques when it comes to embodying their characters on screen, and keeping in mind her attitude, it doesn’t seem like method acting, for example, is her preference.
Unlike the Daniel Day-Lewis-es of the acting world, not everyone feels it absolutely necessary to constantly be in character, where sometimes it’s just far too much. Then you’ve got those actors who love to improvise, a skill that you might regard as something only accomplished by the best of the best, but it’s something that McDormand believes she is terrible at. Whether she actually is or not is a question of how humble she’s being, but it’s not something she feels confident about, anyhow.
Discussing the movie City by the Sea, which she starred in alongside Robert De Niro, the actor told UPI regarding her costar, “He’s a master at improvisation and I’m really bad at it. I was like, ‘The script, the script’. But it was also interesting because there were some heavy, heavy monologues, like major technical stuff that Bob had to have down.”
Clearly, McDormand prefers to know what she’s getting herself into so that she can adequately prepare, while some stars, like De Niro, are happy to be given the chance to improvise their characters’ lines to embody them more authentically. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it doesn’t mean that one actor is therefore better than the other; it’s just about rolling as you can and winning some Oscars regardless.
Related Topics