“It’s a bucket list thing to be in a Woody Allen film, to see how he works, how he will use you,” Marcia says. The star of ABC’s Trophy Wife (cancelled after its first season) and HBO’s The Newsroom says her new film marked a career goal. Just this month, she’s appearing as Emma Stone’s mother in Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, and even plays the matriarch in 2015’s sultry Fifty Shades of Grey. Mom has become a recurrent role for Marcia onscreen, too. “It is as if I am trying to create a Norman Rockwell painting because that is childhood to me,” says the La Jolla, Calif.-born Harden.
The Oscar-winning actress for the 2000 film Pollock, who turns 55 next month, takes time off in July to travel with her brood to the Catskills in upstate New York, where they take part in the simple joys of summer. Thirty seconds into a conversation with Marcia Gay Harden, it’s obvious which of her current roles she enjoys the most: playing mom to daughter Eulala, 15, and twins Hudson and Julitta, 10.
