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!!!

Independence Day


Character: First Lady Marilyn Whitmore

Directed by: Roland Emmerich

Written by: Roland Emmerich, Dean Devlin

Produced by: Dean Devlin

Cast Members: Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Randy Quaid, Margaret Colin, Vivica A. Fox

Released date: July 3, 1996

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

The aliens are coming and their goal is to invade and destroy Earth. Fighting superior technology, mankind's best weapon is the will to survive.

In Mary’s words…

First Lady Marilyn Whitmore! I was just talking about her yesterday, because we were shooting downtown, and when my driver was taking me home, I looked up and I saw the U.S. Bank building… and suddenly the whole moment inIndependence Day came flooding back where Marilyn Whitmore is on the roof of one of the buildings in L.A. and gets into the helicopter, and then she looks over at the roof of another building, where all these Los Angelinos are dancing and asking the aliens to take them. It was a blast!
I was really surprised, though, because when I read the script, I think I was working on something else at the time, so I had to read it pretty quickly, and… I hadn’t really done a lot of action movies before, so I didn’t really know how to read the special-effects paragraphs. So I kind of skipped over them and I looked through the story, looked for the characters and the usual things I look for, and I said, “Oh, I’d love to play this! This will be wonderful! This is going to be quite a wonderful movie!” When I went to the premiere and saw them blow up the White House, I was absolutely astonished! I was, like, “Oh, my God! Look at the movie I agreed to!” But in the long run, it was really a fun, marvelous thing. I loved it.
[from “Mary McDonnell on Battlestar Galactica and going mute in front of Robert Redford” by Will Harris]

Script developed by Never Enough Design