Mary McDonnell

Mary Eileen McDonnell was born on April 28, 1952, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, one of six children born to Eileen (née Mundy) and John "Jack" McDonnell, a computer consultant. Of Irish descent and raised Roman Catholic, McDonnell relocated with her family to Ithaca, New York during childhood, where she completed her upbringing. She later attended the State University of New York at Fredonia. Her father died when she was 21 years old.

McDonnell began her professional stage career in New York, appearing off-Broadway in two separate productions of Buried Child in 1978 and 1979, both times in the role of Shelly. In 1981, she received an Obie Award for Best Actress for her work in the play Still Life. Her Broadway career spanned from 1986 to 1996 and included three productions: Execution of Justice, The Heidi Chronicles, and Summer and Smoke.

Following more than two decades of theater and television work, McDonnell made her film breakthrough in 1990 playing Stands With A Fist in Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, portraying the daughter of American settlers who had been raised by Sioux Indians. The character was the adopted daughter of Graham Greene's Kicking Bird, and McDonnell, then 37, was actually two months older than Greene and less than two years younger than Tantoo Cardinal, who played her adoptive mother Black Shawl. The role earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Two years later, her performance as May-Alice Culhane in Passion Fish (1992) brought her a second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her additional film credits include Tiger Warsaw (1988) with Patrick Swayze, Grand Canyon (1991), Sneakers (1992), Independence Day (1996), in which she played First Lady Marilyn Whitmore, the 1997 film 12 Angry Men, in which she played the judge, and Donnie Darko (2001), in which she appeared as Rose.

On television, McDonnell's first regular role came in 1980 on the soap opera As the World Turns. She starred in the short-lived CBS medical comedy E/R in 1984, and later guest-starred in 2001 on the NBC medical drama ER, receiving an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Eleanor Carter. She played Dr. Virginia Dixon, a surgeon with Asperger syndrome, in three episodes of Grey's Anatomy in 2008 and 2009. In 2003, McDonnell starred as Laura Roslin in the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, a role she reprised when the property expanded into a weekly series. The series concluded in March 2009, and her performance earned her international recognition, including an invitation to the United Nations for a retrospective and discussion alongside co-star Edward James Olmos. She also participated in a Battlestar Galactica session at the 2009 World Science Festival alongside Michael Hogan and scientists Hod Lipson and Kevin Warwick. In 2011, McDonnell appeared in Scream 4 as Kate Roberts, the mother of Emma Roberts's character. From 2009 to 2012, she held a recurring role as Captain Sharon Raydor in the TNT series The Closer, receiving an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series in 2011 for the role. When The Closer concluded its final season in 2012, the character continued as the lead of the spin-off series Major Crimes, which debuted on August 13, 2012 and ran until January 2018. In 2023, McDonnell played Madeleine Usher in the Netflix miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher.

McDonnell married actor Randle Mell in 1984. The couple have two children, Michael and Olivia, and separated in December 2021.