Frances Lee McCain

Class of 1966: Everybody’s movie mom

With more than 80 film credits over a five-decade career, Frances Lee McCain has sustained a prolific and versatile performing career on stage, television and film.

She was born in July 1944 in York, Pennsylvania. At Ripon, she majored in philosophy, was a member of Alpha Chi Omega/Alpha Gamma Theta and appeared in theatre productions, including the title role in “Antigone,” Rosalind in “As You Like It,” Queen of the Amazons in “The Rape of the Belt,” Elise in “The Miser” and Cathleen in “Riders to the Sea.”

“I started out in the Red Barn,” she said. “Then it burned down, and I was teased that it was due to my final performance there in ‘Antigone.’

“I really had no plans to go into theater professionally,” but Philip Clarkson, professor of speech and drama at Ripon College, suggested that she consider acting as a career. “I was amazed and asked if he was serious. ‘Yes, I think you can do it,’ he said.”

She was accepted into the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and found she loved the world of theater. “I discovered a heightened sense of being alive on stage,” McCain said. “I like the camaraderie, the process, discovering text and doing plays together. It opens you to others — why we do what we do, what motivates us. It gave me access in a way I wouldn’t otherwise have had.”

As a stage actress, she first appeared on Broadway in Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam” and played Stella to Faye Dunaway’s Blanche DuBois and Jon Voight’s Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in the 1970s in Los Angeles.

She also has been active with the American Conservatory Theater’s acting company, ZSpace Studio in San Francisco and Alter Theater Ensemble in San Rafael, California.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she became well-known playing the mother of a main teen character in several major films: As Lynn Peltzer, mother of Billy Peltzer, in “Gremlins”; as Ethel McCormack, mother of Kevin Bacon’s character, in “Footloose”; as Stella Baines, mother of Lea Thompson’s character, in “Back to the Future”; and as Mrs. Lachance, mother of Wil Wheaton’s character in “Stand by Me.”

She also appeared as the mother of Rose McGowan’s character in “Scream” and in “Patch Adams.”

Among her numerous television credits is playing the female lead opposite Ronny Cox in her own television series “Apple’s Way” in 1974.

McCain earned a master’s degree in psychology in 2000 from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She also received the Ripon College Distinguished Alumni Award in 1986 and an Honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts in 1988.

In the spring of 1987, she returned to Ripon as a guest professor in drama.

She said connection is what makes theater important for everyone. “We love stories, and we love to have ourselves reflected back to us. It gives us the opportunity to see ourselves with an interpretation we might not be able to make otherwise. It’s a shared communal experience that is essential in community.”

McCain moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2010 and is enjoying “semi-retirement, the beauty of the region, occasional travels, and time with family and friends far and near.”