This soft-spoken, offbeat, and appealing stage-trained actress won raves and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Melvin's flustered but caring wife in Jonathan Demme's "Melvin and Howard" (1980). Mary Steenburgen could have parlayed this triumph into a high profile Hollywood career but opted instead for modest projects, gentle comedies, and occasional genre films. Pretty, vulnerable, and intelligent, she convinces as the thinking man's heartthrob in such charming fantasies as "Time After Time" (1979), as the modern significant other of a time-traveling H.G. Wells (played by Malcolm McDowall,
