writing and directing talents of the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen - and to the acting ability of Frances McDormand in the key role of an adulterous Texan whose enraged husband hires a killer to wreak revenge on her.
When Hunter could not get out of a Broadway theatre commitment, McDormand auditioned for the Coens. "I didn't know anything about making movies then," she says. "But I thought the Coens were very weird. They were my own age for one thing, which was odd. They were chain-smoking at the time and had this huge ashtray on the table, full of cigarette butts. They asked me if I wanted to smoke, which was amazing in an audition. Then they asked if I had any questions. I asked a question and Joel proceeded to go into this 20-minute explanation. I thought, `This isn't going to work, guy. You can't do this while you're working, or you'll never get anywhere.' "
They asked her to come back at four o'clock that afternoon, to read with John Getz, who has been cast as the lover in Blood Simple. To their amazement, she said she couldn't, that she had to watch her then boyfriend in his first acting job, a small role in a TV soap opera which was being broadcast at the same time. "Joel later told me that they thought I was crazy to watch a soap opera instead of coming to an audition," she says. "Anyhow, they changed the time to five o'clock."
She and Joel Coen have been together since. They married, and they have a three-and-a half-year-old son, Pedro, who joined her in Dublin this week. She loves children and spends much of her spare time as a volunteer with the 52nd Street Project based in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York. "I've been involved with it for 12 years," she says. "It's basically recreational for kids from seven to 14 and takes place in the world of the theatre. We do playwriting classes with the kids and in the summer we take 10 kids away for the week to work on plays. We've recently added an educational extension to it. The adult volunteers come in and help kids who are having trouble in school."
In 1988 Frances McDormand was playing Stella in Streetcar when Alan Parker cast her as the gutsy beauty parlour owner who stands up to the local racists in Mississippi Burning. "It's rare in any movie for a woman to make any kind of transformation," she says. "You're lucky if you can add a third dimension on any level to a female character in a film's life. But Alan Parker was great to me. I think he went to bat for me to do the part and he made me really feel like I was in a collaborative position. It was a great experience for me. I don't know how great it was for him, because once he told me I could open my mouth, I kept it open and never shut up."
She received her first Oscar nomination for that performance and she found the ceremony a weird experience. "I flew in, did it and flew out," she says, and Geena Davis won the Oscar for The Accidental Tourist. The only other thing she remembers about the night was watching the show's risibly misconceived opening musical number in which Rob Lowe danced with Minnie Mouse. "I thought it was stunning that this was theatre for them out on the west coast," she says. "They know so little about theatre out there."
Over the next nine years, before she was back at the Oscars with her nomination for Fargo, Frances McDormand alternated regularly between stage and screen, although her movie prospects were mixed. Her friend, Sam Raimi, directed her in the effects-driven comic-strip adaptation, Darkman, which was, she says in retrospect, a good experience for her. "But at the time I was really bored out of my mind just being a kind of prop, and a woman in an action film is a prop."
While she was filming Darkman, Ken Loach offered her the lead in his Northern Ireland drama, Hidden Agenda. She was unfamiliar with Loach's work because it was rarely distributed in America at the time, and she asked Liam Neeson, who played the title role in Darkman, about Loach. "Liam genuflected, basically," she says, "and told me I shouldn't pass up the chance to work with Ken." She spent two of her weeks on Hidden Agenda in Dublin and travelled to Cannes for its premiere where it proved a political hot potato. In John Boorman's political drama set in Burma in 1988, Beyond Rangoon, McDormand took a supporting role to work with Boorman and to travel in south east Asia. She played a German Jewish doctor in Bruce Beresford's concentration camp drama, Paradise Road, and she was a psychiatrist in Gregory Hoblit's thriller, Primal Fear. She had worked with Hoblit years earlier when she had a recurring role for six episodes on Hill Street Blues. She took over as a public defender when Veronica Hamel's character became a district attorney. "Then they realised that she was out of the precinct too much and they had to find a way to bring her back," she explains. "So they had to get rid of me. I got the script one day and suddenly my character who was always a nerd, a dweeb, had becomes extremely tense. On the day of the shoot I suddenly discovered that she had become a cocaine addict. So I had to start drinking a lot of coffee to get into the role! But I made more money out of that job than I had since I got out of school. I even had a savings account for the first time in my life."
Asked if she regrets not working more often in the Coen brothers' movies, she says: "Yes, on the one hand because I love their movies. But on the other hand I had to have my own career, not only because it makes for better stories when you come home at night, but also just pride-wise. It was important, especially when I was younger, that people couldn't say that I got a role because Joel was my boyfriend. Now it doesn't matter. If people want to say I slept with him for 13 years to get the part in Fargo, let them!"
Fargo produced Frances McDormand's finest performance to date; she was subtle yet formidable as Marge, the methodical and tenacious small-town Minnesota police chief who, undeterred by the fact that she is seven months pregnant and by her lack of experience with serious crime, immerses herself in a kidnapping case and its homicidal consequences with all the sharpness of her wits. Some people in Minnesota took exception to Fargo, claiming it a parody of their dialect and their people. "I'm sure - and I know Joel and Ethan so well - that they were not making fun of the people," McDormand says. "And many of the actors are from that area - the kidnapped wife is from Fargo itself, for example - so the regional mannerisms were very familiar to them."
Waiting for the opening of the envelope on Oscars night last year was "kind of numbing", she says. "But we were all riding on this euphoria, not just because of Fargo being recognised in so many categories, but because so many independent features which we had seen and liked were in there, too. It was like getting invited to your parents' cocktail party. You know, like `We are grown-up, we must clean up enough for them to let us come'."
Roles as juicy as Marge in Fargo are the exception for women in the film industry, she believes: "My theory is that film is still a really young medium and there are only so many genres. New genres have to be created. You can start with a script that's fascinating and is peopled with female characters, but gradually through the process of `development', they become genre movies - the male buddy movie, the action movie, with females in those roles.
"But if you're a woman waiting around for three-dimensional characters, you're going to be waiting a long time. Which is why theatre has been really important to me professionally. Like this now, doing Streetcar here. The satisfaction and the growth I'm going to achieve by stretching my muscles for Blanche is going to set me up for the next 10 years of the tiny things I'm going to get to attempt in film. There are always roles waiting in the theatre for actresses - huge chunks of bloody red meat to get a hold of, whereas in film there's mostly just cocktail peanuts."
A Streetcar Named Desire begins previews at the Gate Theatre on April 30th (??) and opens on May 5th.