Their longest stay was in Monessen, Pa., a steel town near Pittsburgh, where, she told the public-radio benefactors, the mill “glowed and thrummed, day and night.” The working-class women she plays are familiar to her from childhood. “Those are the people that held me and raised me, and the work ethic I have,” she says. That’s why she shows up herself for lighting and camera set up, though it is expected that hired stand-ins endure the technical rehearsals. McDormand does her hair and makeup too, if it’s efficient. “I’m a member of the company, I’m not outside of it,” she says. “I like being right in the middle of everything. It’s isolating and vulnerable.”

It was at Monessen High School that she acted for the first time, as Lady Macbeth. She was 14, and an English teacher had the students put on scenes from Shakespeare after school. “I spent a lot of time alone reading books, and this was the first time that literature took me into a public place where I could share it with other people,” she told me. She started acting in school plays, never as the lead but as the colorful characters, the ones who came out screaming or fainting. She went to Bethany College in West Virginia, because it was affiliated with the Disciples of Christ and she could get a scholarship. There, she became the only theater major in her class, drove vans across the border into Pennsylvania so her classmates could buy birth control and steadily worked her way through her post-hometown to-do list: sex, drugs, profanity.

At 24, newly graduated from Yale’s M.F.A. program in acting, she was offered a role in “Blood Simple,” which marked the beginning of her professional career as well as of her 33-year partnership with Joel Coen. From the start, they met each other’s instincts with unquestioning courtesy. “It was a revelation that I could have a lover who I could also work with and I wasn’t intimidated by the person,” McDormand told me. In past relationships, she struggled against feeling subservient, trapped in fraught sexual power dynamics. “But that didn’t happen with Joel. It was: Wow! Really! Oh, my God! I can actually love and live — not subvert anything, not apologize for anything, not hide anything.”

Though they moved in together almost right away, they waited 10 years to marry, and until recently her wedding band was a ring once owned by Coen’s first wife, which McDormand adopted, thinking it shouldn’t go to waste. In 1995, they adopted a baby from Paraguay, whom McDormand still refers to by his full name: Pedro McDormand Coen. Pedro is now 24, a personal trainer and, lately, a grip on his father’s movie sets, but McDormand still likes to tell stories about the outfit he wore on his first day of first grade. Jane Anderson described their household as haimish. “She’s a great homey cook,” she told me. “You go to her house and she’ll whip up a great pork chop and a salad and she’ll throw it down and set a beautiful table and make you a good pot of English tea and a cookie.” Joel will “show up to your house and bring a pie in a wonderful antique pie carrier that Fran found somewhere.”

The McCoens, as McDormand sometimes refers to her marriage unit, now maintain two residences: an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where they’ve lived for decades, and a 1,300-square-foot house in what McDormand would prefer me to call An Unnamed Town in the Pacific Northwest. This is where McDormand spends most of her time, and she forbade me to specify even a state, not so much because she worries people will track her down but because she feels protective of her Unnamed Town. She is involved in local efforts to protect affordable housing, and with the local radio station. The cheesemonger runs around the counter to give her a hug when she comes in.

The day before I flew there to visit her, McDormand decided, after some deliberation, that I was not invited to her house. “It is mine,” she emailed me, “and I also don’t like articles where actors reveal their private lives.” This was part of a longer missive about her complex relationship to anger, and the pain of being adopted, so I pushed back. She was unmoved. Her reply was a link to the online portfolio of the architect who helped them with their last renovation and a dare: “Guess which is ours.”

So we hiked. McDormand had instructed me to meet her in the parking lot of a nearby cafe, and when I arrived she was sitting straight as a soldier, dressed in her “hiking skirt” (ankle length, denim). We hopped into her car and drove to a nearby freshwater spring to fill our water bottles, which she stuck in a backpack packed with cheese and apples for our lunch. As we carved our path up the mountain, she told me about her next project with Jane Anderson, based on a trilogy of Conrad Richter novels published between 1940 and 1950 called “The Awakening Land,” which they’re adapting into another mini-series. She’ll play the oldest iteration of the main character, Saird, a pioneer woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby and, while still covered in blood, throws herself on top of a wild turkey and wrings its neck so her other children won’t starve. McDormand clapped with glee. “Isn’t that great? What actor wouldn’t want to play that?” We sat on some rocks in the forest, and she began unloading plastic bags of cheese and crackers from her knapsack.