On March 4, Frances McDormand will sit inside L.A.’s Dolby Theater and learn whether she wins the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, McDormand plays Mildred, a grieving, irrepressible mother seeking to shame local police into solving her daughter’s murder.
Deborah Marion has yet to see the movie. Not because the parallels between that fiction and her fact would be unendurable. No, she’s missed the film for more pragmatic reasons. “Movies are like $15 now,” she says flatly. “I can wait.”
In July 2010, Marion’s son, Lorenzen Wright, returned to his hometown of Memphis.