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| Mary was born in Newport, Arkansas and spent most of her life in Little Rock, Arkansas. The first thing people notice about her is her strange name, the "g" is pronounced like a "j". She says, "Its a Dutch name that goes as far back as any of the family remembers-about three or four generations in Arkansas." A big change for her came when she was 13 and left her state for the first time on a school trip to Washington DC. The spirit and energy of the big city made he realize she wanted to leave her small town. Of her teenage years she says, "I was one of those girls whose parents hated all her boyfriends. I was attracted to Arkansas hippies, and wasn't exactly a non-freak myself." At age 19, in 1972, she left Arkansas by train one day at 4AM for New York to study acting. She had no experience and hadn't even met an actor in he life. She didn't know anyone and stayed at the East End Hotel for Women on 79th street. Her first acting work was at the New York Neighborhood Playhouse. The direct or the playhouse, Sanford Meisner, liked her and hired her for a second season. She left soon after and with several other alumni from the Playhouse, formed an improvisational group called Cracked Tokens. They had no theater and performed at halfway houses. The legend of how she got started was a chance meeting with Jack Nicholson in a restaurant where she was working as a waitress at The Magic Pan, a crepe restaurant, won her the chance to go out to Hollywood for a screen test. Though she explains differently about going to a casting call on 5/7/77, "I decided I was going to sit in that stinking room until somebody saw me." This was her motion picture debut opposite the actor (and director) in Goin' South. Co-starring in the film was Christopher Lloyd, who spoke one of the first lines ever uttered on screen to Steenburgen. "Chris played a character named Towfield. In the film, when I spurn his advances and save Jack, who is a criminal about to be hung, Towfield says 'I've asked you out a thousand times, and all I got was the flap of your umbrella'." Jack also educated her not only on the secrets of acting, but of the great actors like Tracey and Hepburn whom she was unfamiliar with. Even though the film was a commercial disaster, she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1978 for her role. Unfortunately she would have to go back to being a waitress until the next role came along. She wanted to wait for a role she believed in. Nine months later it finally came. That role was Amy in Time After Time, where set met, fell in love and eventually married Malcolm. The only problem was that he was already married at the time. Mary wouldn't be swayed though and was prepared to fight for him, and she won. In 1981 she said of Malcolm, "Compatible is a terrible, boring word, but if anyone's compatible, it's that man." Of the role she later said, "Actually, I've played the same scene in that film and in Back to the Future Part III," she reveals. "I've had a man from a different time period tell me that he's in love with me, but he has to go back to his own time. My response in both cases is, of course, disbelief, and I order them out of my life. Afterwards, I find out I was wrong and that, in fact, the man is indeed from another time, and I go after him (them) to profess my love. It's a pretty strange feeling to find yourself doing the same scene, so many years apart, for the second time in your career." The role of Amy made her a home town hero. Ex-president Bill Clinton was running for governor and was speaking before a group of retired railroad workers, and he was talking to them about a sort of mentoring program of senior citizens with the youth. He mentioned the potential in the community for people, and he had just heard about this young woman who came from a real working class family in Arkansas who had been discovered by Jack Nicholson and cast in a film. He's telling the story and the importance of being there for the young people, and he hears this sobbing in the audience. He keeps talking and realizes there's this real weeping going on, and he's thinking what a great job he's doing talking. After he finished his speech, he went down into the audience and went up to this man who's wiping tears from his eyes, and he said, "I see that my remarks have touched you and I wanted to meet you. My name is Bill Clinton." And he said, "Well, my name's Morris Steenburgen and if you're going to talk about my daughter, I think you ought to meet her!" Since then they have become lifelong friends. The Clintons used to stay with Malcolm and Mary in London and they were also at her and Ted's wedding. Mary said it was the best present because he brought the secret service with them and it kept photographers out. In 1980 she won Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress with her portrayal of Lynda Dummar in Melvin and Howard which was also her first nude scene. She was really nervous about it, but Malcolm was an expert and encourage her, "You liked the script when your read it, now just do it." She was pregnant on the set and soon after she gave birth to their first daughter. After Melvin she was directed by Milos Foreman in Ragtime. The director called her "remarkable" and she again won critical praise. At the Oscars she said to Malcolm from the stage, "You make me feel like dancing." Quoting the Leo Sayer. Her next role would be in Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy followed by Romantic Comedy, costarring Dudley Moore. Soon after they bought their first house in Ojai, Ca which Malcolm still considers his home town. In 1987 she also tried her hand at executive producing and acting in the End of the Line. The movie must have appealed to her because it was about the railroad which held deep roots in her family, though the film was not highly praised. Lindsay Anderson also put her in one of his last films, The Whales of August. Soon after her father died in 1989. Ironically, though they often talked about it, the couple would never do another major film together. The closest they came was an episode together for Shelly Duvall's Faerie Tale Theater. The show consisted of famous people acting out fairy tales. Mary played a not-so little Red Riding hood to Malcolm's big bad wolf. While she had the lead role in Cross Creek as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the first time she had to carry a movie on her own, Malcolm only appeared in one small scene. The two would never again appear on film together even though in 1982 Mary was still saying, "Malcolm and I would love nothing more than to work together again and we will". Their last work together was in the failed play Holiday directed by Malcolm's mentor Lindsay Anderson in the UK in 1987. When Malcolm and Mary met she said, "For a long time, when Malcolm and I would meet people, they would shake his hand and look into his eyes and keep looking at him while they shook my hand because he was a movie star, and they'd never heard of me. It made me mad, not because I needed their attention, but they were meeting another human being, movie star or not, and their priorities were screwed up." Around this time Malcolm's career was going down and hers was going up. Though neither have said it, this probably put a strain on their relationship. By 1988 they were separated and by 1990 they were divorced. Since they have two children together, neither have bad mouthed each other and they still maintain a decent relationship for the kids. There was never a reason given to the public because of the spilt. Other projects include the TV mini series Tender Is the Night, One Magic Christmas, and in Dead of Winter she played multiple roles. In 1990 she worked in her biggest budget film and one of her most famous roles as Clara in Back to the Future Part III. Like Malcolm in Get Crazy, she also took a role that required her to sing in The Butchers Wife during 1991. After that she stopped acting so she could campaign for Bill Clinton's presidential run in 1992. She has continued to act throughout the 90's in big films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Philadelphia, Powder and Nixon. In 1995 she remarried to environmentalist nut Ted Danson, who said in 1988 that the oceans were going to freeze. The two met when he auditioned for Cross Creek back in 1983. In 1996 they began working together on TV on the movie Gulliver's Travels and the series Ink, which started the same time as Malcolm's series Pearl and both only lasted one season. At the time it was one of the most expensive failures in TV history. In 2000 she started taking less mainstream, usually as the middle-aged mother, roles like Picnic, Wish You Were Dead, Life as a House. Though she will never be a highly recognized Hollywood actress like Nicole Kidman, she continues to work steadily and win critical praise. Besides an Academy Award. She has also received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Arkansas in Little Rock and Hendrix College in Arkansas. |
| Curly haired, sandy-voiced actress Mary Steenburgen is a natural when it comes to playing Southerners, probably because she hails from the region herself. Born in Arkansas on February 8, 1953, Steenburgen was the daughter of a railroad employee. Pursuing drama in college, she headed to New York in 1972, where she worked with an improvisational troupe. She was spotted by Jack Nicholson, who cast her as his feisty "in name only" frontier wife in 1978's Goin' South. Two years later, she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Melvin Dummar's inamorata in Melvin and Howard (1980). Able to convey a wide age and character range, Steenburgen was effectively cast as a free-spirited Frisco girl in Time After Time (1979), the corseted matriarch of a turn-of-the-century household in Ragtime (1981), prim authoress Marjorie Rawlins in Cross Creek (1983), a long-suffering suburban housewife in Parenthood (1989), and a Marcia Clark-like attorney in Philadelphia (1993). She also portrayed the Jules Verne-loving Western schoolmarm Clara in Back to the Future 3 (1990), a role she perpetuated (via voice-over) on the Back to the Future TV cartoon series. In 1988, she was executive producer of End of the Line, in which she also appeared. Steenburgen's film appearances throughout the 1990s were erratic: some highlights, in addition to Philadelphia, include What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Nixon (1995), and The Grass Harp (1995). In 1999, she starred as Noah's wife in the biblical epic Noah's Ark, sharing the screen with the likes of Jon Voight, F. Murray Abraham, James Coburn, and Carol Kane. Formerly married for several years to actor Malcolm McDowell, Steenburgen married former Cheers star Ted Danson in 1995. The two have collaborated on a number of projects, including 1994's Pontiac Moon and the made-for-TV Gulliver's Travels in 1996. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide |
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