Edition 22: Growing up on screen
The thing with actresses starting at a young age is that you see them growing up on screen. You can of course never predict what they’ll be like in the future, sometimes they turn out to be different than you ever imagined.
There are two possible ways we can see people growing up on screen, there are the actresses that start out on TV and there are the ones that start in movies. With movies you see them growing up in steps, you see them once in a while. With TV you can literally see them growing up, they can even change over the course of a TV season.
One of the most famous examples probably are the Olsen twins, you could literally see Mary-Kate and Ashley start out as babies on Full House. After that they kept exploiting their cute twin factor in straight to DVD movies from their own production company Dual Star. But what everyone knew would happen really did happen; their cuteness factor wore off and now we just see two close to being anorexic fashion disasters in the tabloids. They’re now trying to get into acting again but solo; the twin thing isn’t that useful for adult actors.
Someone who grew up in a completely different way on screen is Scarlett Johansson. She started out in movies and stayed there, so we saw her developing in intervals. We could see her as an average little girl and an average teenager in all sorts of movies, in bigger roles and smaller roles. Suddenly one day we’re suddenly confronted with a Hollywood bombshell who’s a big favourite with both critics and the more hormonally driven crowd.
Amanda Bynes is pretty much an example of someone who grew up like everyone expected. From 1997 to 2006 she was basically continuously on TV shows so we could really see her grow up, first on Nickelodeon with All That and The Amanda Show (making her the youngest ever to host a cable show) and later on the WB with What I Like About You. She started out as the little cute funny girl and now she’s more or less the big cute funny girl. Now the media are trying to turn her into a babe since her success on Hairspray now she completely crossed over to movies.
There is also the kind of people we could see growing up on screen but we didn’t really realise it. Take Hayden Panettiere, she has been in the business for years already but she never really got roles that got her noticed. Then all of a sudden she gets cast in Heroes and voila she’s an audience favourite, I’m pretty sure that the people who like her didn’t realise that they’ve probably have seen her in other movies before.
Then there’s the case of someone you wouldn’t expect to grow up in a certain way. When Lindsay Lohan did The Parent Trap she was this cute freckle faced girl, she took a little break for a while with only a couple of Disney TV movies. When she returned to the big screen she had grown in a certain department and got popular with the hormonal crowd. Turning into a sex symbol isn’t a bad thing but nobody expected her to turn into a train wreck. She’s in rehab for the third time and who knows if she’ll ever be her old self again, though we don’t really know if she ever was the old self everyone believed her to be.
Some people just don’t grow up on screen. Hilary Duff almost seemed unchanged throughout her entire career, both in looks and role selection. After she turned eighteen it seems that she’s trying to catch up, a more sexy look at concerts and public appearances. And now with other movies coming out she also tries to grow up in that department.
There are a lot of ways people can develop, makes you wonder about the current generation of girls growing up on screen. It’s impossible to tell who the eighteen year old sex symbol will be in 2011; some of the fourteen year olds are already trying hard. We also don’t know whose lives will fall apart once they are adults, it’s just impossible to tell. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds for the current generation of girls growing up on screen.
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