Turns out, we all owe Holly Hunter a big “thank you.” For bringing us Broadcast News, Raising Arizona, and — of course — the feminist manifesto/masochistic love story hybrid that is The Piano, yes. Sure. But also for helping to create one of the longest lasting and, more importantly for cinephiles everywhere, most creatively fruitful marriages in Hollywood: that of actress Frances McDormand and director Joel Coen.
McDormand first met her future husband Joel, who is one half of the renowned Coen brothers filmmaking team (hey there, Ethan, we certainly didn’t forget about you), when she auditioned for the duo’s debut feature, Blood Simple, in 1983. The brothers had initially written the role for the aforementioned Holly Hunter, who also just so happened to be McDormand’s classmate at the Yale School of Drama. But when Hunter was already booked on another project and couldn’t take the role, she recommended her then-roommate for the part, and the rest, as they say, is history — clearly kismet cinematic history, to be specific.
In this case, fate liked to play a little hard to get. When McDormand first auditioned for the role of Abby, the young, adulterous wife of a bar owner who finds herself smack in the middle of a murder-for-hire plot gone wrong (a darkly comic premise that we now know will reappear several times in the Coen brothers later work), she impressed the brothers so much that they immediately asked her to return and read for them again alongside another actor who had already been cast. But McDormand declined, telling the directors of what would become her feature film debut that she couldn’t because — oof, wait for it — her current boyfriend was going to be appearing in a soap opera and she had promised to watch. (Ah, youth.) But the Coens were charmed by her boldness. ”We really liked that. It was so guileless — just what we wanted for Abby,” Joel later told The New York Times.
The two proceeded to promptly fall for each other on set in Austin, Texas, bonding over a box of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler paperbacks. “He seduced me with literature,” McDormand told The Daily Beast. “We discussed books and drank hot chocolate… it was fucking hot.” The couple, who married a year later, have since gone on to collaborate on six additional films. (Yes, six, not seven: while McDormand’s second starring role in 1985’s Crimewave was written by the Coen brothers and their longtime cohort Sam Raimi, of Evil Dead fame, it was directed by Raimi and thus doesn’t make this particular master count.)
Up next: the Coen brothers comedic magnum opus, Raising Arizona, in which H.I., a somewhat dim, generally well-intentioned but hilariously ineffectual baby-napper and convenience store stick-up man of an ex-con husband, played by Nicolas Cage, kidnaps a quintuplet from a wealthy family who “got more‘n they can handle” in the hopes of soothing the maternal obsession of Ed, his supposedly much smarter, unfortunately infertile, ex-cop wife, played by Holly Hunter. (Hooray, the Coen brothers managed to nab her for a leading role after all.) In this delightfully chaotic comedy with a heart of gold, the versatile McDormand steps into the small but pivotal role of Dot, the wife of Ed’s wannabe wife-swapping boss and a certifiable mom from hell. (How did McDormand get into character? Fake breasts, of course. Dot was supposed to have had five kids, after all.)
McDormand then went on to earn her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her understated, layered performance as the unhappy, abused wife of a Klansmen in the non-Coen brothers film, Mississippi Burning before coming back into the family fold with small appearances in their 1990 gangster movie, Miller’s Crossing, and 1991’s polarizing Barton Fink. But it was her next role, as Marge Gunderson, the extremely pregnant, utterly unshakeable chief of police in the Coen brother’s Fargo, that ultimately netted her the Oscar and catapulted her into the cultural conscious.
McDormand is physically beautiful, stunning even, and capable of emitting sex appeal in droves when she needs to do so (see: the often underrated Laurel Canyon), but she’s not afraid to hide it behind a puffy coat when the role calls for it. The unintentionally funny, always good natured Marge may not appear until 30 plus minutes into the 98-minute Fargo, but that doesn’t matter. Once she arrives, she owns the narrative (dontcha know).
In The Man Who Wasn’t There, a thriller set in suburban 1940s California, McDormand plays the philandering wife of Billy Bob Thorton’s self-effacing barber, Ed Crane. The two, Ed regrets to inform us via voiceover, “have not performed the sex act for many years,” and Ed’s subsequently bumbling attempts to blackmail her boss, Big Dave (perfectly played by James Gandolfini), would be in danger of skewing more depressing than anything else if it wasn’t for the carefully balanced performances of the film’s leads — and the inarguably beautiful black-and-white cinematography — that instead elevate it to be arguably one of the Coen brother’s best films.
The couple’s most recent collaborations, in 2008’s Burn After Reading and 2016’s Hail, Caesar!, swing back to the more lighthearted, screwball end of the spectrum while still remaining true to the Coen brothers’ brand of self-aware dark humor. As Burn After Reading’s Linda Litzke, a disgruntled D.C. area gym employee who lets her longing for supposedly life-changing cosmetic surgery lead her into a misguided attempt to blackmail a low-level CIA operative over his lost memoirs, McDormand manages to steal the show from costars of no less pedigree than Brad Pitt and George Clooney — a feat for which she can, in part, thank her husband. And we can all, of course, thank her.
Because as she explained to Willem Dafoe in a post-Fargo interview for BOMB magazine, “That’s what’s so fucking hard about working with Joel and Ethan. It’s so satisfying, it’s so complete, it’s really hard not to judge whatever you do after in the same way.”
#Relationshipgoals?
Watch Frances in Mississippi Burning and the Coen Brothers’ Fargo on Tribeca Shortlist now.
