Quotes from Frances McDormand

My feminist training was that this was your goal, to be a self-sufficient woman, but that is a miscalculation. It's just not the way we work. We work in dialogue with the community.

I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

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.

The fact that I'm sleeping with the director may have something to do with it.

In comparison to other women in the world, perhaps I'm seen as smaller. But I've never had a problem thinking of myself as a large woman.

With aging, you earn the right to be loyal to yourself.

I've given just as much of my life to that, and I practiced it with the same zeal, as I have acting. And I think that many of my skill sets from being a housewife I used for producing. Because you don't stop until it's done.

I like hard rock, and classic rock, and even metal.

It was really fascinating for everyone involved in 'Fargo' that Marge Gunderson became the iconic character she did. I think it was something about the cultural zeitgeist and what was happening with women in the workplace.

I haven't done much press for many reasons, but mostly because it's not an interesting dialogue about work that's been done. It's turned into something else. It's become this ridiculous other thing.

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.

We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There's no desire to be an adult.

A movie set actually can be a good place to have a family atmosphere.

I don't think of myself as a movie star and I can pretty easily convince other people that I'm not a movie star.

There's only two givens with choosing acting as a profession: one is you will always be unemployed, always, and it doesn't matter how much money you make, you're still always going to be unemployed; and that you have no power.

Unfortunately, any girl - unless you're playing the action hero - is going to end up at some point handcuffed, gagged, and waiting for the hero to save her.

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.

What's wrong with Hell's Kitchen? You don't change a neighborhood by changing its name. You change it by building a school.

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.

Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.

KWMR is my radio station, and I intend to have a job there as I get older. That's what I'm lobbying for. They don't need me. They've got plenty of people. But let's see if I can make myself indispensable.

I went to high school in a steel town in Pennsylvania.

I'm a character actress, plain and simple... Who can worry about a career? Have a life. Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.

I portray female characters, so I have the opportunity to change the way people look at them. Even if I wasn't consciously doing that, it would happen anyway just because of how I present as a woman, or as a person. I present in a way that's not stereotypical, even if I'm playing a stereotypical role.