"Frances McDormand, or Fran, as she is called in regular life, cuts a handsome figure on the street. She is 60 and sexy in the manner of women who have achieved total self-possession. She eschews makeup unless she is working, doesn’t dye her hair and despises the nips, tucks and lifts that have become routine for women of her profession. Her clothes are well made — she loves clothes — but utilitarian and comfortable. … Over the course of her 36-year career, McDormand has played women who are attractive but rarely beautiful, magnetic but thorny — and, she notes, they’re usually the supporting player in a man’s story. To this day she is best known for Marge, but Marge had much less screen time than people remember. Her slightly daffy good-heartedness serves as the foil for the murderous men who occupy most of Fargo … In the last 10 years, something shifted for McDormand: Right as she hit the age when most actresses begin disappearing for lack of roles or moving to the edges of story lines, she moved to first billing. For decades, she excelled at the work of embroidering the lives of women who aren’t deemed appealing enough to watch for two hours straight, and rather than aging into a different acting type, she has taken it upon herself to put peripheral women at the center."