Cross Creek: The Film That Brought Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Back to Life

In 1983, Mary Steenburgen stepped into the role of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and brought one of Florida’s greatest literary stories to the screen. Cross Creek tells the true story of a New York writer who abandoned city life in 1928 to live alone in a cracker farmhouse in the Florida scrub, and found everything she needed to write.

The film is based on Rawlings’ 1942 memoir of the same name, which chronicles her years at Cross Creek in rural Alachua County. It is not a story of dramatic conflict. It is a story of a woman falling in love with a place, the hammocks and wetlands, the orange groves and palm-thatched barns, and the fiercely independent people who called the Florida interior home.

Filmed in the Real Florida

Director Martin Ritt shot much of the film on location in north-central Florida, capturing the landscape that Rawlings wrote about so lovingly. The Spanish moss hangs heavy. The light filters through live oaks. The pace is unhurried and deliberate, just like life at Cross Creek itself.

Rip Torn earned an Oscar nomination for his role as Rawlings’ neighbor Marsh Turner, and Alfre Woodard was nominated for her portrayal of Geechee, the housekeeper who helps Rawlings navigate her new life. The performances are warm and grounded, matching the film’s quiet confidence.

A Love Letter to Place

Cross Creek is ultimately about what happens when a writer finds the place where her imagination comes alive. For Rawlings, that place was a patch of Florida backwoods that most people would have driven right past. The film honors that discovery without romanticizing the hardship, the heat, the isolation, the financial struggles, that came with it.

If you have ever read The Yearling or visited the Rawlings homestead in Cross Creek, this film will feel like coming home. And if you haven’t, it might just convince you to make the trip.