Mary Steenburgen knows how to coax a laugh but is equally at home with the dark side
SANTA MONICA, Calif. - She can still see him, her father, waving from the top of a boxcar, dawn filling the sky behind him, many years and miles from where she is now, sitting in a glass house near a redwood, taking stock of her latest movie, her long Hollywood career and the wondrous and scary things learned in an Arkansas childhood.
Mary Steenburgen set out cheeses and blackberries. Her husband, Ted Danson, left a bit ago, and the garden was quiet in a morning cool that reached up from the ocean in Santa Monica. The daughter of a freight train conductor, Steenburgen has been a recurring whisper through our lives for decades, an intuitive comedic presence who is at once innocent and knowing, inured and rebellious, a woman who can see a dream dying but not be broken.
Her middle-class upbringing, with its church-going and Southern sensibilities, has lent an American aesthetic to her acting and her life. She's a woman you could laugh it up with in a bowling alley but know that by night's end, your secrets would be safe. "Mary's the glue that holds us together," said Will Forte, creator and star of the TV comedy "The Last Man
