It is part of the mysterious alchemy of Hollywood that most child stars
are destined to fade as they grow up, forever remembered for what they
did as kids, while a small handful grow even bigger and brighter as they
move into adulthood. Elle Fanning looks to be one of the chosen few.
Like Natalie Wood and Jodie Foster before her, this fourteen-year-old
doesn’t merely shimmer with promise. She delivers on it, getting better
and better with each passing year
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Such volatile material
would be challenging for anyone Fanning’s age—“I realized that I’d
matured a bit doing it,” she says—yet she gives a performance of great
sophistication. Whether registering joy, desolation, or utter confusion,
she has an emotional transparency older actors might envy. If her
sister, Dakota, wows you with her Streep-like facility, Elle possesses a
natural luminosity that goes straight to your heart.
“Elle can surrender to a scene in an extraordinarily interior and
intelligent way,” says Potter. “At the end of a take, she would look up
at me for approval and love with this radiant smile.”
I recognize
that smile when I meet Fanning one wintry afternoon in West Hollywood.
She turns up in her Campbell Hall school uniform (blue blazer, white
blouse, pleated skirt), a blonde, beaming, startlingly lanky girl who
disarms me with a delighted “Hi!”
In an industry notorious for
its run-amok Lindsays, it’s well known that Dakota and Elle’s parents,
Steven and Joy Fanning, have raised nice, decent, well-adjusted
daughters, first in Conyers, Georgia, and then in the San Fernando
Valley. Elle may be walking red carpets and attending couture shows with
Karl Lagerfeld, but she talks with the unaffected ordinariness of a
ninth-grader. She admits to “a movie crush” on Ryan Gosling, loves
biology class (she’s taking honors), haunts vintage-clothing shops, and
pulls out her phone to show me a photo of her schnoodle dog, Lewellen:
“My screen’s cracked,” she says, giggling, “but isn’t she cute!”
“With
all the attention on her,” her friend Coppola tells me, “she hasn’t got
any attitude. She still gets excited about Halloween costumes and
ballet class.”
Robert Stromberg recently directed Fanning in the blockbuster
Maleficent
(due out in 2014), in which she stars as Princess Aurora, the innocent
nemesis of the demonic title character played by Angelina Jolie.
Fanning, he says, is a brilliant actress, but she also has something
more: “Who knows what It is, but Elle has this quality that’s not only
engaging but makes you want to pay attention to her.”
After
we’ve chatted for a while, the time comes for Fanning to leave—it’s a
school night, after all, and her grandmother’s waiting to drive her to
ballet class. She steps forward and gives me a hug, a very sweet kid
with a very big future. As she bounds off, I remember something Cameron
Crowe told me about working with Fanning on
We Bought a Zoo.