Frances McDormand: isometric actress

A room full of people waited patiently for the arrival of Frances McDormand, DRA '82, at an Ezra Stiles Master's tea. Amid the murmurs, the Academy Award-winning actress stepped in without anyone noticing and sat on the center-stage chair. She looked at the crowd of about one hundred and then asked: "Wait a minute, who are you people?"

ALISON CLOWER/YH The crowd sits, disappointed, as McDormand ardently refuses to say 'Yah, how ya doin'!'

With this cheerful and lively tone, McDormand began an engaging conversation about her experiences as an actress. Every episode she related managed to evoke grins and laughs from captivated audience members. McDormand explained her love for theater as well as for the big screen, and warned that she would not stay if she weren't allowed to talk about both. She pointed out that most people know her from movies like Mississippi Burning, Fargo, and Lone Star, but that she equally values her experiences in the theater.

To compare the two mediums, McDormand described the development of a "musculature system for acting" embodying the crucial difference between theater and film. She compared a role on stage to weight lifting, where one must "practice continually to gain the strength you need to surpass a certain threshold." By contrast, film roles are like isometric exercises. The task is to find an inner strength to show off at a very specific moment. McDormand formed this theory while filming Blood Simple, the first movie written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen. For the end sequence of the movie, as a madman chased her character, McDormand's job was to act as hysterical as possible. "I realized I had to be hysterical for two hours," McDormand noted, "and then I had to rest for two hours, and then be hysterical again for two hours. And then I said to myself: `Fuck! I don't know how to do this!'"

Her acting coach instructed one of the grips of the movie to hold her tight until she reached frenzy. "Repeating this exercise," McDormand continued, "I slowly searched for the hysteria in me. When we were about to shoot the scene, I asked Joel, one of the producers, to hold me madly and let me go as soon as Ethan screamed `action.' And so every time Ethan yelled `action,' I was ready." The actress paused and gave the audience a mischievous grin. "Then, of course, I married this guy," she concluded, referring to her marriage to Joel Coen.

With the same ease and friendliness, McDormand related her experiences as a student at the Yale School of Drama. As she progressed from a rural Midwestern town to increasingly larger cities, "New Haven was a valuable education. It left me ready for the rest of the world," she said. McDormand also seemed to leave her audience quite satisfied. Dan Osnoss, ES '03, for one, gushed over McDormand. "She is to acting what John Stockton is to basketball," he said, comparing McDormand to the Utah Jazz point guard. "On screen, she's one of the best in the business, but off it, she has the endearing air of a down-to-earth, everyday woman. She doesn't have the usual pretensions of a superstar."

Of course, people were itching to ask the forbidden question: "How does it feel to win an Academy Award?" McDormand laughed for a second and then compared winning to being on a theater stage with no props and all the actors pulling away from you for a monologue in front of thousands of people. "But I felt ready," she declared. "And I had mastered the Minnesota accent," she put in, referring to her character in Fargo.

In this way McDormand expressed her desires to learn, act, and work in a personal way, the one that seemed the most comfortable to her. She captivated the audience by telling original and amusing personal stories. Again in her sparkling manner she confessed: "I am doing a bed-scene for a movie now...and I'm not shaving my armpits. I never do during the winter." With this, she raised her left arm and pointed smilingly at her underarm. The audience continued to laugh in what proved to be a witty and exciting conversation. Francis McDormand, performing one of her roles in a singular and comedic way, made theater and film come alive once again.

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