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Mary Steenburgen
Scroll down for movie list.
Spouse
Ted Danson (7 October 1995 - present)
Malcolm McDowell (1980 - 1990) (divorced); 1 daughter, 1 son
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Trivia
Mother of Lily Amanda (b. 1981) and Charles Malcolm (b. 1983)
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Most of the women she plays on screen are softspoken and gentle; a few have been a wee bit ditzy. But she's equally capable of endowing her characters with fiery passion and indomitable resolve. In short, Mary Steenburgen is an extraordinarily versatile and appealing actress. After a lengthy stint at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, Steenburgen made her film debut in Goin' South (1978), a pleasantly zany Western starring and directed by Jack Nicholson. She played a modern-day career woman confronted by time-traveling H. G. Wells in the fanciful Time After Time (1979), and married costar Malcolm McDowell in real life. (They later divorced.) But it was her disarming performance as the slightly daffy wife of hapless Howard Hughes heir Melvin Dummar (played by Paul LeMat) in Melvin and Howard (1980) that cemented her stardom-and won her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
Steenburgen essayed a proper but strong-willed mother in the turn-of-thecentury Ragtime (1981), appeared again in period costume for Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), and yet again as real-life author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in the leisurely paced but eminently satisfying drama Cross Creek (1983). Romantic Comedy (also 1983) paired her with Dudley Moore in a wafer-thin script. She top lined the Disney-produced family film One Magic Christmas (1985, in another "mom" role), and did her best to carry Dead of Winter (1987), an intriguing (and uncredited) ripoff of a 1945 B mystery titled My Name Is Julia Ross
End of the Line (also 1987), which Steenburgen executive produced and acted in, was a potentially interesting but ultimately sappy, Capraesque exercise. She starred as the woman who hid Otto Frank and his family in the well-received TV movie The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank (1988). She had a wistful cameo playing Lillian Gish as a young woman in The Whales of August in 1987, but was prominent as the former beauty-contest winner in Miss Firecracker and as Steve Martin's infinitely patient wife in the hit comedy Parenthood two 1989 efforts. In 1990, playing a teacher in the Wild West of Back to the Future Part III she provided love interest for series regular Christopher Lloyd. Later that year she narrated The Long Walk Home a drama of changing times in the segregated South of the 1950s. She got a chance to exercise her vocal cords-with considerable skill, we might add-in The Butcher's Wife (1991), making the most of her supporting role as an introverted woman who finally yields to her desire to sing in public. Recent credits include What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Philadelphia (also 1993, as the attorney opposing AIDS victim Tom Hanks), Clifford, It Runs in the Family and Pontiac Moon (all 1994). Steenburgen remains one of the screen's most compulsively watchable actresses. |  |
