Frances McDormand

Growing up a preacher's kid wasn't the easiest thing. Everybody's always watching you to see how you'll behave - or misbehave.

I want to separate my professional life from my personal life. I want to live a normal life and be a normal mother.

My politics are private, but many of my feminist politics cross over into my professional life.

Most women's pictures are as boring and as formulaic as men's pictures. In place of a car chase or a battle scene, what you get is an extreme closeup of a woman breaking down.

A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that's why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers.

Cinematic icons of the police detective are more male role models than female.

Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.

Long-format television is a better way to tell a female story.

My name is Frances Louise McDormand, formerly known as Cynthia Ann Smith. I was born in Gibson City, Ill., in 1957. I identify as gender-normative, heterosexual, and white-trash American. My parents were not white trash. My birth mother was white trash.

It's kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age.

Something happened culturally: No one is supposed to age past 45 - sartorially, cosmetically, attitudinally.

I went to my school careers counselors and said I wanted to be an actor, and they didn't know what to do. They showed me catalogues with pretty campuses and said, 'Oh, look, there's a theater building. Why don't you go there?'