Top 50 Frances McDormand Quotes

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.

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.

In my theater work, I’ve had much more three-dimensional, broader-stroke characters.

My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there’s this monster – this tiger or lion – that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t matter if they become men or women.

If, when I leave this earth, I’m remembered for ‘Fargo,’ so be it. But I think old Marge Gunderson is gonna get a run for her money with Olive Kittredge.

I can do a good John Wayne.

I know I’m profane. And outspoken.

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.

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.

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

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

It’s a scary thing going into the workforce with a $50,000 debt and you’ve been trained as a classical theatre actor. There’s always a depression in the theatre.

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.

I read books. Remember those? I read them, on paper.

I love flying by the seat of my pants, going at something instinctually.

I’m from working-class, blue-collar America, and I don’t believe that people in that socioeconomic strata wait until they’re 40 to have children.

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.

I tried taking a year off when Pedro was a toddler because I really wanted to be around, but it wasn’t good for any of us.

The only power you have is the word no.

I’m not really that interested in going back to playing small supporting roles.

I can’t do the frappuccino. It’s too sweet. I need it straight.

We don’t need a lot of initiatives for women in film; what we need is money.

I swear a lot; I always have. So does my husband. Our son, surprisingly, does not swear much at all.

People love to drop in ‘you betcha’ as often as they can.

There’s something healing about tears.

I have a very short attention span.

When you lose a spouse, you’re a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you’re an orphan. When you lose a child, there’s no word in the English language for that position, that place that you’re left.

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

I want to be revered. I want to be an elder; I want to be an elderess.

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.

I am not a director or a writer, but a filmmaker.

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.

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.

I think that there’s a clinical mental illness called depression, but I believe that post-industrial America has been narcotized by progress. There’s a cultural malaise – mental illness or no – that everybody suffers from at some point in their life.

All the skills of housewifery are the ones I’m using as a producer.

If you want to talk about cultural appropriation, we have to go back to the Greeks.

Unless I’m on a stage, I don’t want to be the event in someone’s day.

Getting older and adjusting to all the things that biologically happen to you is not easy to do and is a constant struggle and adjustment.

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.

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.

I was too old, too young, too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too blond, too dark – but at some point, they’re going to need the other. So I’d get really good at being the other.

There is simply too much of my life that is involved in my work that I couldn’t replicate in any other way.

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

The crew on ‘Three Bilboards,’ by the way, is one of the best I’ve ever worked with. And that’s not hyperbole.

I’ve got a rubber face. It has always served me very well and really helps, especially as I get older, because I still have all my road map intact, and I can use it at will.

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.

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

I have not mutated myself in any way.

I’ve always known that I’ll have a career for the rest of my life because they’ll always make movies about men, and men need women in their lives. But, when it comes to telling a woman’s story, they’re complex, circular, and not genre-driven.

No actor has complete freedom.