Frances McDormand won best actress award at the 93rd Academy Awards for her performance in Nomadland.

“Nomadland” stars McDormand as a woman who, faced with financial uncertainty, chooses a nomadic existence that includes living in a van and doing a variety of jobs around the western United States. McDormand’s introverted Fern, reeling from the shock of her husband’s death and the loss of her old life, seeks camaraderie in a movement of van-dwelling nomads, the bulk of whom are played by real-life members of that group.

The film is based on Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” which was published in 2017. McDormand worked as a producer on the odd initiative, which began in 2018 with Zhao, McDormand, and others living out of their own trucks. The actor really worked among real-life colleagues at the different businesses where the nomadic Fern was employed.

It’s a historic victory: With her third Best Actress trophy, McDormand has now won the award more times than anybody other than Katharine Hepburn.

She is presently the most decorated living actress at the Oscars (three acting awards and one for Best Picture), as well as the first woman to win Best Actress and Best Picture (as a producer of Nomadland) for the same film. Her total number of awards is four, which is more than any other surviving actress.

Frances McDormand wins Best Actress at the Oscars for ‘Nomadland.’ | CREDIT: ABC

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McDormand delivered a concise but poignant statement after thanking the Oscars audience for Nomadland’s best picture triumph. “I have no words. My voice is in my sword. We know the sword is our work. And I like work. Thank you for knowing that, and thanks for this,” she said.

In 1997, she won for Fargo, and in 2018, she won for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

McDormand beat Viola Davis in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” who had been widely expected to win the Oscar after winning the Screen Actors Guild Award earlier this month, Carey Mulligan in “Promising Young Woman,” Vanessa Kirby in “Pieces of a Woman,” and Andra Day in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.”

Each of the major precursors recognized a different 2021 Academy Award nominee: the BAFTAs (McDormand), the SAG Awards (Davis), the Critics Choice Awards (Mulligan), the Golden Globes (Day), and Venice’s Volpi Cup (Kirby).

Moments earlier, when the cast and crew won the Oscar for best picture, McDormand howled in honor of the film’s production sound mixer, Michael Wolf Snyder, who died in March. “That howling to the moon is for Wolf,” McDormand said after the triumph.

“Nomadland” won Best Picture just before Best Actress, the first time the top prize had not been given at the end of the event since the 1972 show.

Despite her BAFTA triumph and nominations for Golden Globe, Independent Spirit, SAG, and Critics Choice, McDormand was not widely regarded as the favorite in this year’s contest.

“My happiest moment tonight was when Fran won,” Zhao, the first Asian woman (and first woman of color in general) to win Best Director, stated in the Oscars press room on Sunday night, citing McDormand’s triumph. “I think sometimes people might not know what she had done out there, as a producer and as an actress — how open and how vulnerable she has been and how much she has helped me to make this movie and helped all the nomads to feel comfortable on set. She really is Nomadland, and I’m so happy she got that award.”

McDormand joins Ingrid Bergman, Walter Brennan, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson, and Meryl Streep as the only actors who have won three Oscars for acting.

The 93rd Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, April 25, 2021, at Union Station in Los Angeles and the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood. The event, which without a host, aired live on ABC at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.