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!!!
22
Dec 2017

For those of you who have been following me for the past (almost!) 3 years, you know I do not review episodes, nor I comment too much on the site, because I have always firmly believed that a fansite owner needs to be super partes, and always keep things controlled and never expressed for this or that. But the recent events just didn’t pass over me, and it hurts, oh if it hurts.

I have let these days passing, I have tried to understand, sometimes I re-watched glimpses to make it more clear, but I’m still not at that point and maybe I will never be. I do respect the creative decision, and even if feeling some sort of betrayal in the decision from James Duff, I do not hold any grudge against him, or no one else involved. For sure I don’t with Mary, in accord or not with him, she played this character majestically from the start until the end, and I can only imagine how hard it must have been for her to carry on this secret all these months. And I wish it didn’t have to be like this because I wish her nothing but beautiful things in life.

And is in the deepest respect of this decision that I express my opinion and say that I do not agree. Not on the thought and not on the inevitable end it took. I do not agree that Commander Raydor’s death was the only way to end this series, and to be honest it would have ever been, not only in this way but in any other too. She didn’t have to die. She had to save Rusty from Stroh and be given the chance to live happily ever after with the man she had just married and chose to be with for the rest of their lives. I know it sounds cheesy, but the idea that drama is only made for you to cry and suffer and kill characters, in my opinion, is very wrong. The drama can be set in many ways to remain so and still have a happy ending. If not entirely happy then I accept a decent joy in it.

If she had died protecting Rusty from Stroh, by bringing the latter down with her, I would have accepted, still not liked to see her dead, but accepted because she would have died for real for what she loved the most: her family! The Sharon Raydor they presented us in the beginning of Major Crimes, is a Sharon who was a mother before being a cop, who took on a young scared boy to protect him from a serial killer, and who better than a mother can protect a child from the bad of the world and love him unconditionally, even if she didn’t give birth to him? And she did. And then she adopted him.
With the same spirit of love, Sharon has ultimately discovered that she could allow herself the sin of love with a man, she lived with Andy, she married him and before this she was also so much concerned about her health to be a chain holding Andy’s happiness and to have a wife he doesn’t have to take care of. This woman is not a woman who would push the button too hard to her death, and the fact that she had confessed before to him she wished she had died, it’s a simple “weakness” of sick people which is intended to underline, once again, how much far she would go on herself in order to protect the feelings of those she loves. Even if of course her death is a painful weight on their hearts. This way even more.

I have been mad, multiple times, I have been reading articles and interviews, justifications on what the fans would have not wanted, if it was another plot. And it made me very angry, because I am a fan and I know what I wanted. I wanted that the character I have loved for 9 years hadn’t died like this or at all. I wanted that the series I campaigned for 6 years effortlessly would have given the dignity of the hero to her end. I just wanted Sharon Raydor on my screen for those missing 4 episodes to the series finale, fading into an epic end that would have gratified us all and say “Wow that was an amazing tv-show”.

But in the grieving of the events I found peace, and anger is slowly fading away, it comes back at times but mostly I can control it. And is in this peace that I have realized that for all these years, all of us, have played a little Jack Raydor taking her for granted and focusing on celebrating Laura Roslin, because Sharon Raydor was always there. It is in the same spirit now that I hope you will join me, and instead of crying and letting anger take on us, we will celebrate Sharon and show them, on every social, that we will never forget her and that no matter what she will always live in each one’s heart, for everything she taught us and for how much better she made us feel. Don’t do it for them, but do it for Mary McDonnell because for all these 9 years of Sharon Raydor she has been faithful to her character, donating once again and extraordinary performance.

This is what I mean to do from now on, I mean to remember Sharon Raydor: the captain/commander, the woman, the fiancée/wife and the mother. And I start now with stills from episode 8 of season 6!