Who

A talented actress and the wife of director Joel Coen, Frances McDormand is best known for playing pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson in Fargo, a role that earned her an Oscar for Best Actress.

Backstory

The adopted daughter of a minister from the Midwest, McDormand (or "Fran" to friends and family) went to college in West Virginia and moved to the Northeast to attend the Yale School of Drama. After graduation she waited tables and appeared in a few beer commercials to pay the rent, living briefly in a Bronx apartment with former classmate Holly Hunter. When Hunter wasn't available for the lead role in the Coen Brothers' 1985 film Blood Simple, McDormand stepped in and met her future husband, Joel Coen, in the process. She's since appeared in more than a dozen movies and a handful of stage productions.

Of note

McDormand has almost always chosen challenging, offbeat roles and avoided the Hollywood spotlight, both of which might explain why she's adored by critics and discerning audiences alike. She's been a regular in her husband's movies, like Raising Arizona, Fargo (which won her an Oscar in 1996), and The Man Who Wasn't There. But she's appeared in quite a few non-Coen productions, too, including Almost Famous, Wonder Boys, Friends with Money, and Laurel Canyon, in which she appeared naked for the first time on screen (at the age of 45, no less).

McDormand has also had a number of stage roles, in Far Away, The Sisters Rosenzweig, The Swan, and A Streetcar Named Desire, which earned her a Tony nomination in 1988. She returned to Broadway in the spring of 2008 to star opposite Morgan Freeman and Peter Gallagher in Mike Nichols' revival of The Country Girl.

Personal

McDormand and Coen live on West End Avenue in the 70s. They have two apartments in the building: a penthouse that they maintain for business meetings, and an apartment below, where they live with their adopted son from Paraguay, Pedro McDormand Coen. Fran can occasionally be spotted shopping at Fairway on Broadway and 74th Street.

True story

McDormand is a longtime smoker as well as a recreational pot-smoker, as she admitted in an interview with the stoner rag High Times. At the end of the interview, the magazine gifted her a joint, a weed grinder, rolling papers and a container of ganja.

No joke

Sensitive about the size of her chest, McDormand used to carry prosthetic breasts to auditions. She wore the prosthetics in Fargo, since she played a pregnant woman. Reportedly, one of the breasts froze in the sub-zero Minnesota weather and ended up exploding.