This soft-spoken, offbeat, and appealing stage-trained actress won raves and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Melvin's flustered but caring wife in Jonathan Demme's "Melvin and Howard" (1980). Mary Steenburgen could have parlayed this triumph into a high profile Hollywood career but opted instead for modest projects, gentle comedies, and occasional genre films. Pretty, vulnerable, and intelligent, she convinces as the thinking man's heartthrob in such charming fantasies as "Time After Time" (1979), as the modern significant other of a time-traveling H.G. Wells (played by Malcolm McDowall, her husband from 1980-89), and in "Back to the Future III" (1990), with the batty Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd).
After some years of performing improvisational comedy in NYC, this Arkansas native was first discovered by Jack Nicholson who cast her as the female lead in his second directorial effort, "Goin' South" (1978), a Western comedy featuring Steenburgen as an Eastern spinster who saves Jack's ornery hide and wins his heart. Martin Ritt's "Cross Creek" (1983) provided a strong showcase as she enacted writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' journey of self-discovery in a rustic Florida cabin. Her Southern upbringing lent authority to her interpretation of a former beauty queen in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in "Miss Firecracker" (1989). Steenburgen's other 80s credits included Woody Allen's "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" (1982), as Lillian Gish's character in the introductory sequence of Lindsay Anderson's "The Whales of August" (1987) and as Steve Martin's wife in Ron Howard's "Parenthood" (1989).
Steenburgen made her London stage debut opposite McDowall in a 1987 revival of Philip Barry's "Holiday" directed by Lindsay Anderson. The daughter of a Union Pacific Railroad conductor, she made her executive producing debut with "End of the Line" (1987), the Capraesque story of aging railroad men facing the shutdown of their line. Steenburgen appeared in two 1993 films: "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", as an unhappy housewife having an affair with Johnny Depp, and Demme's "Philadelphia", as the attorney representing a law firm accused of discrimination.
Steenburgen made her Broadway stage debut in the title role of Shaw's "Candida" in 1993 and the following year co-starred in a Los Angeles production of "Marvin's Room." She co-starred with Ted Danson (whom she married in 1995) in the poorly received road movie "Pontiac Moon" (1994), about a family in crisis who take a whimsical cross-country trip inspired by the 1969 moon landing of the Apollo XI. Steenburgen proved radiant not doing much of anything in the fantasy "Powder" and as the president's Quaker mother in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" (both 1995).
In 1985, Steenburgen co-starred as F Scott Fitzgerald's heroine Nicole Diver in the British-produced miniseries "Tender Is the Night" (aired on Showtime in the USA). She made a rare TV appearance as Miep Gies, the woman who shielded the Frank family from the Nazis in "The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank" (CBS, 1988). In 1996, she and Danson co-starred as husband and wife in the hit NBC miniseries "Gulliver's Travels" and then went on to co-star in the CBS sitcom "Ink" (1996-97), portraying a divorced couple who work as journalists for the same newspaper--the two would later co-star in the NBC TV miniseries "Living with the Dead" (2002), with Danson as real-life psychic James Van Praagh and Steenburgen as the police detective he consults with on murder cases.
Between projects with her husband Steenburgen kept her active solo career flourishing, with notable roles in the telepic "About Sarah" (1998) playing a mentally retarded mother who lands in the custody of her adult daughter (Kellie Martin), the TV adaptation of the William Inge play "Picnic" (2000), as Jena Malone's mother in the critically praised drama "Life as a House" (2001) and a brief supporting turn as a doctor in the Sean Penn dramedy "I Am Sam" (2001). In 2002 she began a fruitful collaboration with writer-director John Sayles when she appeared with Gordon Clapp as part of an uptight Floridian couple in the ensemble of "Sunshine State"; the following year she played one of a group of American women living temporarily in Mexico while waiting to adopt in Sayles' "Casa de los Babys" (2003). Also in 2003, Steenburgen had a supporting role as the chagrined wife of Will Farrell's biological father (James Caan) in the holiday comedy "Elf" and played Helen, the Girardi family matriarch in the surprise hit CBS drama "Joan of Arcadia" (2003 - ) in which her daughter Joan (Amber Tamblyn) believes she routinely has conversations with a disguised God.