elcome to Mary McDonnell Vault, your online resource dedicated to actress Mary McDonnell. You better know Mary for her role as Captain Sharon Raydor for the TNT crime series The Closer & Major Crimes. But she also did others like Battlestar Galactica, Independence Day, Donnie Darko, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers and many others. Site is comprehensive of a big photogallery with events, photoshoots, magazines, stills, an extensive press library to collect all the articles and interviews on her and a video gallery section for recorded interviews, sneak peeks and trailers of her projects. We claim no rights to know her personally and it's absolutely respectful of her privacy and paparazzi-free!!!

Major Crimes series makes Mary McDonnell a straight shooter

Neal Justin

December 6, 2014


Article taken from The Australian

ANDRE Braugher was ready to bolt. After three seasons of playing icy loner Detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street, the actor was ready to move on, until writers decided his character would suffer a stroke that would force him to learn how to walk — and bark — all over again.

“It was necessary for me to stay a member of the show,” Braugher said on the drama’s Baltimore set in 1996. “I need a compelling character. I need a challenge.”

Mary McDonnell can relate. In the reboot of Battleship Galactica, she played President Laura Roslin, who battled breast cancer, not to mention a series of Cylon attacks. She also received rave reviews as a doctor with Asperger’s syndrome onGrey’s Anatomy.

But in her starring role in Major Crimes, screening on Foxtel’s SoHo channel, she inhabits the part of Captain Sharon Raydor, one of the most sane, stable and sensible characters on television.

So where’s the fun in that?

“I understand exactly what you’re asking,” McDonnell, 62, says by phone. “Sometimes I watch Homeland and I think, ‘Wow, it would be fun to do what Claire Danes is doing.’ (Danes’s character has bipolar disorder.) Then other times I watch and think, ‘Um, Claire, are you OK?’ ”

McDonnell has had a long career playing rich characters. She has two Oscar nominations, one for playing Kevin Costner’s stoic love interest in the epic westernDances with Wolves, the other for Passion Fish as a former soap opera actress who drowns herself in booze after an accident leaves her paralysed.

She will soon return to the stage after a 17-year hiatus to perform in Anton Chekhov’s tragedy The Cherry Orchard in Philadelphia with her daughter. But she seems to enjoy Raydor, perhaps her most grounded role to date, despite the occasional temptation to take a walk on the wild side.

“I’m relishing the economy of the character and playing someone with balance, someone everyone can get behind,” she says. “I mean, we’re actors. We like to rail. Every once in a while, I’ll have her fly off the handle, but then the director and I will talk and decide that’s not the way to go.”

Raydor wasn’t always Miss Congeniality. The character was introduced in 2009 as Kyra Sedgwick’s nemesis in The Closer. When Sedgwick decided to quit the series in 2012, TNT served up Major Crimes as a spin-off and shaved off much of Raydor’s brittleness.

“I wasn’t looking to do a procedural,” McDonnell says. “You know what got me? The change. I liked the idea of taking this antagonist and slowly developing her into a hero.”

The decision has paid off. The 2012 premiere had 9.5 million viewers in the US, the most for a series premiere on basic cable. Ratings for the rookie season were the highest for any new cable show. Season three has premiered in the US, and the series has been renewed for a fourth. BattlestarGalactica and now Major Crimes have given McDonnell the kind of stability her character tries to maintain.

“For so many years I was a vagabond,” she says. “While I cherished that time, I also cherish the gift this past decade has given me to get a real chance to breathe and enjoy these gifts.” Not that she wouldn’t like Raydor to show off some new dimensions. A love interest would be nice, and perhaps even a promotion to Los Angeles police chief. Why stop there? How about Raydor for mayor? “Yeah!” McDonnell says. “Let’s push that one around.”


Script developed by Never Enough Design