http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/arts/frances-mcdormand-true-to-herself-in-hbos-olive-kitteridge.html 2014-10-15 14:37:36 Frances McDormand, True to Herself in HBO’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’ The Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand, who set the HBO mini-series “Olive Kitteridge” in motion and stars in it, chafes at Hollywood’s conventions and defies its norms. === Frances McDormand’s Oscar, for “Fargo,” isn’t easily spotted. It’s tucked into a corner of the floor-to-ceiling shelving that hems the foyer of her Manhattan home, a glint of gold among hundreds of books. But odder than its hiding place is its eyewear. She has fastened a pair of tiny sunglasses, meant for a Ken doll, to Oscar’s venerable head. Once, she said, “I put him in a cowboy outfit.” This was in 2011, when her husband, the writer and director Joel Coen, was nominated for several Academy Awards for the western “True Grit.” She couldn’t be with him at the ceremony in Hollywood, so she watched on TV from this apartment, with dude-ranch Oscar as her date and talisman. The statuette performed questionably in both roles, failing to muster any clever banter or a single win. It does a much better job as a metaphor for the mischievous distance that Ms. McDormand keeps from the industry that gave it to her. She chafes at Hollywood’s conventions; she defies its norms. Her relationship with her trophy illustrates that, and so does Adapted from Elizabeth Strout’s Ms. McDormand set the entire project in motion, acquiring the rights to the book more than five years ago, signing on as one of the main producers and helping to assemble the creative team, including the director (Lisa Cholodenko, with whom she worked on the little-seen 2003 movie It’s also a statement of intent. She’s no longer going to wait for other people to bring her good parts. And she won’t emulate other actresses in her age range — she’s 57 — and cast herself in the most flattering light possible. “It’s a subversive act,” she said. And while she partly meant the subtlety of “Olive,” she mostly meant the showcase that it affords older actors playing older people with late-in-life worries. “Olive” is her answer to an industry and a society that she finds perverse in their fixation on youth. “We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species,” she said. “There’s no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It’s not seen as a gift. Something happened culturally: No one is supposed to age past 45 — sartorially, cosmetically, attitudinally. Everybody dresses like a teenager. Everybody dyes their hair. Everybody is concerned about a smooth face.” Well, not everybody. Her own short hair on this late September afternoon was an impish chaos of dark and white patches and untamed tufts pointing every which way. She’d done nothing to disguise the lines around her mouth and eyes, and her brow furrowed readily and completely. She showed me. “I have not mutated myself in any way,” she said. “Joel and I have this conversation a lot. He literally has to stop me physically from saying something to people — to friends who’ve had work. I’m so full of fear and rage about what they’ve done.” Looking old, she said, should be a boast about experiences accrued and insights acquired, a triumphant signal “that you are someone who, beneath that white hair, has a card catalog of valuable information.” The words tumbled out of her rapidly and bluntly. She had points she wanted to make and made them in an open, down-to-earth manner with an occasional edge to it, a bit of a prickle. During the production of “Olive,” she found herself more comfortable being wizened and grayed for the sequences when the Kitteridges are in their 70s than being blurred and buffed for when they’re in their 40s. To play those younger years, Mr. Jenkins, who is 67, was given tape to tighten loose skin below his jawline. She wasn’t, not at first. Then one day, after a camera test, Ms. Cholodenko pulled her aside and, as Ms. McDormand recalls it, nervously asked, “Did you ever read Nora Ephron’s essay about her neck?” “Yes,” Ms. McDormand answered. “Give me the tape.” “Then you know what I’m talking about?” Ms. Cholodenko said, relieved. Ms. McDormand smiled as she remembered the exchange, explaining, “She thought she was going to have to give me this whole speech about how she was sorry I wasn’t looking young enough.” The actress learned at the start of her career not to care too much about appearances. “I was often told that I wasn’t a thing,” she said. “ ‘She’s not pretty enough, she’s not tall enough, she’s not thin enough, she’s not fat enough.’ I thought, ‘O.K., someday you’re going to be looking for someone not, not, not, not, and there I’ll be.’ ” She specialized in idiosyncratic characters: the pregnant, waddling detective in the Coen brothers’ “I’ve been with a man for 35 years who looks at me and loves what he sees,” she said. Joel Coen wasn’t available for an interview, but Ethan said that for Ms. McDormand, acting “is never an exercise in vanity.” She is scheduled to shoot a small part for the Coen brothers’ next movie, That she was drawn to the part of Olive speaks volumes. The character is described in Ms. Strout’s interlaced stories — which read, in aggregate, like a novel — as large, plain and clumsy. And she’s defined by what she doesn’t do: show her emotions; speak in more than a sentence or two. Yearning to play Olive is the opposite of yearning to play Medea. The only weapon that Olive wields against her lone child, a son, is her caustic unpleasantness. And she hangs at the edges of things, a witness to events as much as an agent of them. That actually endeared Ms. McDormand to the role, because, while she has had many leads in the theater (and Even in “Fargo,” she noted, “I don’t come in until halfway through.” Her character, Marge Gunderson, registers as a major presence only “because of her stature, physically and dramaturgically,” she said. Marge wasn’t in the recent FX series “Not interested,” she said, explaining that she’s leery of “the cultural appropriation of intellectual property.” Ms. McDormand didn’t see herself as Olive when she initially read the book, for pleasure. But the actress Katherine Borowitz, a longtime friend, saw it and urged the part on her. Ms. Borowitz said that Olive’s frankness mirrored Ms. McDormand’s, and that Ms. McDormand had the right kind of background, having grown up in out-of-the-way areas of Kentucky, Tennessee and western Pennsylvania. “I think of her as being kind of a small-town girl,” Ms. Borowitz said. “Her dad was a preacher.” Ms. McDormand and Joel Coen have made New York their primary home for more than three decades now, and it’s here that they reared their son, Pedro, who’s the reason she declined interviews for a long stretch. She wanted to deflect celebrity, to minimize the odds that she’d be interrupted by strangers when she and Pedro journeyed through their neighborhood. But he’s 19 now and away at college. “I can come back into the arena,” she said. She plans to continue producing, as she did not only for “Olive” but also for a forthcoming movie, No glamour there, but then she has never been much for it. Toward the start of our long conversation, as we sat down to a salad that she’d made us for lunch, she warned me that she sometimes chewed with her mouth open. “I’ll probably choke at some point,” she added. “Or spit on you.” She gave her Olive a recurring quirk that Ms. Strout’s version didn’t have and that caught the writer by surprise when she watched a scene in which Olive ambled reluctantly to her son’s wedding. “Fran was walking and belching, and I was like, ‘You go!’ ” Ms. Strout said. “My Olive would never have belched, but her Olive is belching, and it’s fabulous. I wished I’d thought of it. It was amazing. It was beautiful.”