by Nathaniel R
Whoa. Frances McDormand is the cover star of Vogue's January issue (the profile is up now). It's not every day you see a 60something woman on the cover of a legendary fashion magazine! But Frances McDormand is hardly an every day kind of woman. She's more of the 'only a few times a generation' sort. The only other 60something woman to make Vogue's cover in the past twenties year was Meryl Streep...
So let's just say this is major major get for the awards team on Nomadland. Since, like Meryl, Frances is not exactly known as a fashion icon (though she looks super stylish in the photoshoot).
As Murtada reminded us on Twitter, Vogue usually but not always gives their January cover to an actress in an Oscar hopeful. That semi-tradition stretches back to around 2009 when Anne Hathaway graced the cover during her Rachel Getting Married campaign though it didn't happen in 2010. After that it's pretty steady: Natalie Portman (Jan 2011 Black Swan), Meryl Streep (Jan 2012 The Iron Lady), Cate Blanchett (Jan 2014 Blue Jasmine), Sienna Miller (Jan 2015 American Sniper), Alicia Vikander (Jan 2016 The Danish Girl), Ruth Negga (Jan 2017 Loving), Lupita Nyong'o (Jan 2018 Black Panther), and Greta Gerwig (Jan 2020 Little Women).
There's a lot of fine lines and observations in the beautifully written profile by Abby Agguire but here's one my favourites:
SOME CHARACTER ACTORS GET typecast. Others are chameleons. McDormand falls into the chameleon category, though she is never physically unrecognizable. When she disappears into a character, she does so through the force of her acting. And yet the women she embodies are so distinctive, so idiosyncratic, and sometimes so strange, I tend to remember them as though they were real people. Her performances are indelible the way a Diane Arbus photograph is indelible—a snapshot of an individual, utterly unique and alive.