'Dances With Wolves' Star Reveals the Wild Reason She Decided to Have Kids
Mary McDonnell had been acting professionally for years. She had Obie Award on the shelf and was stacking up off-Broadway credits, but there was still something missing in her decision about whether she should have a child. Then one morning she read the New York Times in bed with her coffee, and that changed her mind.
'All right, we can have a kid now,' she told her then-husband, actor Randle Mell, on the phone that morning. He was in Washington doing a play. She was in bed. She'd just read a rave review of her performance as Nora in A Doll's House at Hartford Stage.
The 'Dances With Wolves' star opened up about the moment on The Sackhoff Show, hosted by her former Battlestar Galactica co-star Katee Sackhoff. Her husband's reaction to the call? 'Well, gee, well, great. That's all it took, huh?' She was pregnant about a month later.
It sounds impulsive. McDonnell says it was actually something deeper.
She and Mell had always known they wanted kids. He'd grown up in a big family, wanted children, was ready to go, but she was the uncertain one. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I want to have two someday,' was how she put it. The someday was the problem. She didn't know what had to happen first.
What had to happen, it turned out, was that she needed to believe she was 'legitimate'.
McDonnell came to acting in college, later than many of her peers, and spent years feeling like she was catching up. She'd racked up serious credits, including an Obie Award in 1981 for playwright Emily Mann's Still Life, a gut-punch docu-drama about Vietnam and Agent Orange, but the insecurity didn't end. The night after accepting the Obie, she was waitressing at a Greek restaurant in New York when a table of customers recognized her. 'Weren't you...didn't you get...' they stammered. The story still makes her laugh.
Related: 'Little House on the Prairie' to 'Stargate': 5 Nostalgia Reboots Coming in 2026
'I wasn't sure I was legitimate,' she told Sackhoff. The New York Times, she explained, was the arbiter of opinion in her family growing up. When the paper validated her work at Hartford Stage, something changed. 'It gave me a sense of security and a feeling of peace, which allowed me the room to think, well, maybe I can do it all.'
That peace didn't mean motherhood was easy once it arrived. McDonnell described the hardest part as leaving her children in the late afternoon to go prepare for evening performances, walking out the door as it got dark, the kids unsettled, dinner not yet on the table. 'That was the hardest thing for me,' she said, 'to separate from the children during the late afternoon, early evening.'
She sought therapy, leaned on help, and asked herself honestly whether what acting demanded of her was taking something essential away from her kids. 'Sometimes I wasn't sure,' she admitted.
What she was sure of that morning in 1986, NYT in hand, was that she'd finally stopped waiting for permission.
Copyright 2026 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 9:40 AM.