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Biography
There are many children who act, but very
few who do so on an equal footing with their adult peers. Kids are so
often there simply to be cute, not to truly inhabit a character, not to
understand their part like an actor many years their senior might. Natalie
Portman did an amazing job in Leon, appearing towards the end to be
far, far older than she was.
But even that performance paled next to
that of Kirsten Dunst in Interview With The Vampire. She actually had to
play an adult trapped in a child's body, and a particularly worldly-wise
adult at that - and she did it with such sensitivity and precision she
was nominated for a Golden Globe. Remarkable.
No less remarkable was her canny growth
through teen movies into more adult material. Though perhaps overly
prolific at points, her transformation was continuous and with
Spider-Man under her belt, at the time the fifth biggest US box office
hit ever, she could now concentrate on following her idol, Jodie
Foster, into writing and directing.
She was born Kirsten Caroline Dunst on the 30th of April, 1982, at Point
Pleasant, New Jersey. And the name's pronounced Keersten, not Kursten.
Her father, Klaus, was a medical services executive. Her mother, Inez,
was an artist and former gallery owner. In 1987, they'd give Kirsten -
usually called Kiki due to her early failure to pronounce her own name -
a baby brother, named Christian.
Klaus didn't think much would come of it, but Inez began to put young
Kirsten forward as a model, such that she was working by the age of 3.
By 4, she was signed up to Elite and the Ford Agency. She made her TV
debut in an ad for dollies that really wet themselves - she would appear
in over 70 ads in all - and her debut proper, aged 6, on Saturday Night
Live, playing the grandchild of Dana Carvey's President Bush.
All the while, she attended Ranney School
at Tinton Falls, New Jersey. By now, Klaus and Inez had separated and,
once Kirsten had made her first big screen appearance - as Mia Farrow's
child in the Woody Allen segment of New York Stories - Inez took her and
Christian off to Los Angeles, hoping to see her daughter become a star.
She didn't have to wait for long. After
Kirsten had starred, vocally, in the co-incidentally named animation
Kiki's Delivery Service (about a young witch, and co-starring Phil
Hartman and Janeane Garofalo), and had a small part in Loving, a
long-running series about the wealthy Alden family in Corinth,
Pennsylvania, she entered the big-time - and at the very top.
The Bonfire Of The Vanities, directed by
Brian De Palma, based on Tom Wolfe's bestseller, and starring Tom
Hanks and Bruce
Willis, looked set to be massive. And Kirsten was right in the thick
of it, as Campbell McCoy, daughter of Hanks' Sherman McCoy, the
"master of the universe" stockbroker who gets pulled into the
race struggle and is utterly destroyed.
The movie, sadly, was one of the biggest bombs in history but Kirsten
escaped unscathed. Now attending Notre Dame, a private Catholic high
school in Los Angeles, she appeared in the silly-but-fun comedy Highly
Strung. Then came some TV work, first as Kitten in Sisters, a series
about four very different sisters, featuring Swoosie Kurtz, Ashley
Judd and, for a short while, George
Clooney. Then there was a part in Star Trek: The Next Generation, in
the TV movie Darkness Before Dawn, where she played the younger self of
a teenager addicted to drugs, and in Greedy, where Michael J. Fox and
others are after rich man Kirk Douglas's wealth.
Then, in 1994, she made many millions of females jealous (particularly
Christina Ricci, who was also up for the role) when she co-starred with Tom
Cruise and Brad
Pitt in Interview With The Vampire, directed by Neil Jordan and
adapted from Anne Rice's horror romance.
Of course, at age 11, she felt nothing
for either of the world-famous hunks, even when she shared her first
screen kiss with Pitt. "There's nothing sexual or sexy when you're
that age", she said later. "So I was kissing Brad
Pitt: so what? He had chapped lips. He was lovely and kind and sweet
to me, but it was just yuk."
They were all lovely to her, Cruise and Pitt becoming like big brothers
on set. Cruise even brought a Christmas tree, fully decorated, into her
dressing room. Later, in People Magazine, he'd say "There seemed to
be the experience of a 35-year-old actress in the body of that little
girl", and he was quite right.
Kirsten was quite brilliant as Claudia, a
child made into a vampire by Cruise's Lestat and Pitt's Louis, and then
trapped forever in that child's body, as her mind and desires matured.
Truly hellish. And how quickly and convincingly she took to the
vampire's life, ensnaring and slaughtering without pity - unlike the
constantly wavering Louis. That Golden Globe should have been hers -
though winner Dianne Wiest was admittedly great in Bullets Over
Broadway.
And 1994 brought a second great success, in Little Women (another role
she seized from poor Christina Ricci). Here, in yet another adaptation
of Louisa May Alcott's classic about the women of the March family,
Kirsten played the youngest daughter, mischievous little Amy, who grows
up to be the far-more-mannered Samantha Mathis. Also onboard were Winona
Ryder, as maverick sister Jo, and Susan Sarandon.
Kirsten kept going. Next, in the
excellent Jumanji, she and her brother (Bradley Pierce) play an ancient
board-game, inadvertently releasing Robin Williams, who's been magically
trapped in the game for 26 years. Unfortunately, they also unleash all
manner of wild beasts which proceed to terrorise their small town.
But it wasn't all fun. Now came some deadly serious parts. In ER, she
took a recurring role as Charlie Chiemienga, a teenage hooker taken
under the wing of George "Dr Ross" Clooney. Then there was
Keith Gordon's Mother Night, where Nick Nolte was a US spy in war-time
Germany who, pretending to be an anti-Semite to avoid suspicion,
pretends so well he is believed by everyone to be a Jew-hater.
Sheryl Lee played his wife, who turns up
again years later, with Kirsten as her younger sister. Then, keeping to
the right-wing path, there was Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy. This
re-told the true story of Randy Weaver, a survivalist whose Idaho home
was besieged by the FBI in 1992. Laura Dern played his wife Vicki, with
Kirsten his daughter, Sarah.
Kirsten was now accompanied by a tutor at all times because, up until
her graduation in 2000, her work-rate meant she was very seldom at
school. First came Disney's hilariously spooky Tower Of Terror, where
she played Steve Guttenberg's niece, helping him investigate the
disappearance of five people (including a child star!) in Hollywood
Towers Hotel in the 30s. Then she provided the voice of Young Anastasia
in Fox's cartoon, Meg
Ryan providing the older version.
Now, having worked with Hanks,
Willis,
Pitt, Cruise,
Clooney,
Nolte and Douglas, she increased her list of major male co-stars with
Wag The Dog. Here the President has been caught fondling a girl scout
and, to divert media attention from what is hardly a minor faux pas,
Washington spin doctor Robert
De Niro and Hollywood producer Dustin
Hoffman stage an invasion of the US by Albania. Kirsten was again
excellent, this time as an actress playing a girl fleeing from Albanian
rapists with her sympathy-tugging kitten. A year later, Kirsten would
briefly date Hoffman's son, Jake.
True Heart, where Kirsten played one of two kids stranded in the
Canadian forest after a plane crash, was Disneyesque in style.
Befriended by a native and his bear, the kids are being led to safety -
till hunters decide to nail the bear. This would be Kirsten's last
"kid" role as next she played the unfortunate lead in Fifteen
And Pregnant, concerning a family's reaction to their daughter's
accidental condition. It was a salutary lesson for any girl under
pressure to "give it up".
Next came Small Soldiers, where chips
manufactured by the military are inserted into action figures, with
suitably chaotic results. Kirsten played a tough biker girl who helps
out the nerdy hero. She enjoyed the acting part, pretending she was
being attacked by hundreds of little demons that weren't actually there.
But she was miffed that her character, as said a girl with some spunk,
eventually fell for the nerd.
Now Kirsten purposefully veered between teen comedies and deadly serious
dramas. In Strike!, she led Gaby Hoffman and Rachael Leigh Cook in a
campaign to prevent their school turning co-ed in 1963, playing pranks
like getting choirboys drunk. In The Devil's Arithmetic, she played a
modern Jewish girl who, not keen on all the tradition, is transported
back through time into a WW2 death camp. Co-starring was her friend
Brittany Murphy.
After that came a modern classic, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides.
Here Kirsten was Lux Lisbon, one of five blonde sisters cursed with a
strict religious mother (Kathleen Turner) and a wimpy dad (James Woods).
When one of the sisters attempts suicide, they're briefly let free, much
to the joy of the neighbourhood boys.
But once Lux has sex with hunky Josh
Hartnett and finds herself left lying in the middle of a football
field, all romantic illusions are dashed and a sisterly suicide pact
comes under consideration. It was a beautiful movie, both hazy and
glaringly bright, like a summer dream. And Kirsten, in tube tops and
cords, playing a promiscuous role for the first time, carried it.
Next, more comedy, as Kirsten played Amber Atkins in Drop Dead Gorgeous,
a biting satire on teen beauty pageants. Here Kirstie Alley played a
former pageant winner who's risen to prominence in her small town and is
desperate that her daughter, played by Denise
Richards, should win too. Thus she resorts to all manner of beastly
violence to nobble her opponents (the police turning a blind eye), but
just can't seem to get to Atkins. Brittany
Murphy featured too.
It was cruel and very, very funny, as was
Dick, where Kirsten and Michelle Williams played two high school girls
who stray from a White House tour, meet President Richard Nixon and,
somehow, become not only his secret advisers but also the famed and
enigmatic Deep Throat connection for Woodward and Bernstein in the
Watergate scandal.
Kirsten was now putting in five movies a
year. 2000 brought The Crow: Salvation, where an innocent man is
executed for the murder of his girlfriend, then is resurrected by black
birds and seeks the truth - while protecting his girlfriend's endangered
sister, played by Kirsten. Then there was Luckytown Blues, where she was
Lidda Doyles, a young girl who leaves home to find her estranged father,
James Caan, and finds him in Las Vegas, where he's involved in a big
poker game with an arch-enemy.
For a while, Kirsten was the undisputed queen of the teen comedy. After
Drop Dead Gorgeous came Bring It On where, as Torrance Shipman, she
played the leader of a troupe of cheerleaders in a privileged school.
Discovering that all their moves have been stolen from inner city troupe
the East Compton Clovers, they must choreograph themselves and take on
the Clovers in the big championship. Kirsten had actually performed as a
cheerleader before. At High School she taken it up because, being away
from school working so much, she thought it would help her fit back in.
After this, a $68 million hit in the States, the next comedy would be
Get Over It, where Ben Foster has the same girlfriend for years then,
having split badly, he comes to realise that his best mate's little
sister (Kirsten) actually isn't that little anymore. Kirsten would make
her singing debut here, with Dream Of Me, and would date Foster in real
life for some six months, up to March 2001. It was her first real love.
Before Get Over It, there had been two more dramas. There was Deeply,
where she played the tragic heroine in a story being related by writer
Lynn Redgrave (Kirsten's co-star in Strike!) to a tormented youth. And
there was All Forgotten, a European adaptation of Turgenev's story First
Love where Kirsten played a poor girl in 19th Century Russia,
manipulating all her older suitors. A boy falls for her, only to find
one of her suitors is his own father. It was typically melodramatic and
depressing Russian fare, but showed that Kirsten was keen to leave High
School romps behind.
She was also keen to abandon her goodie-two-shoes image, which had clung
to her despite The Virgin Suicides. So, using her newfound sexual
experience, she took on Crazy/Beautiful where she played a rich girl -
emotionally battered and strung out on booze and drugs - who gets into a
relationship with a straight-edged Latino guy, played by Jay
Hernandez.
This involved Kirsten's first real sex
scene and, amazingly, it was she who allayed everyone's nerves. Taking
Hernandez's hand, she placed it on her breast saying "You can touch
them, they won't bite". After the scene was completed, in the
editing room, Inez Dunst asked "Kiki, where did you learn to make
that face?" But all of this Kirsten considered necessary. One
scene, where she had to walk naked through the house, she didn't
consider necessary - so it didn't happen.
After Crazy/Beautiful there was one last
small movie before the massive fame brought by Spider-Man. Peter
Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow involved the supposed murder of Thomas Ince
aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst in 1924. Eddie Izzard played
Charlie Chaplin, while Kirsten impressed as Hearst's mistress, Marion
Davies, a 27-year-old.
And then there was Spider-Man. Both Kate Hudson and Alicia Witt had
turned down the role of Peter Parker's love interest, Mary Jane Watson
(as Kirsten had turned down Mena
Suvari's role in American Beauty). But Kirsten wasn't so picky. She
knew that such a role in a monster hit (plus sequels) could secure her
career and give her space to write, direct and star in more interesting
projects, like her heroine Jodie
Foster (she already has a production company, called Wooden Spoon,
with Inez). T
hus she became Mary Jane, who's lived
next door to Tobey Maguire's geeky Peter Parker for a decade but doesn't
know he exists - that is, until he's bitten by a genetically altered
spider and begins his battle with Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin. Then he
becomes more interesting.
Spider-Man was an immense success, despite some of its CGI effects being
conspicuously cartoonish. It raced past the $100 million mark in just
three days, the fastest ever, eventually taking $463 million at the US
box-office, making it the 5th biggest film ever made. Of course, Kirsten
would return for Spider-Man 2 where, this time, Maguire would be racked
by an identity crisis, Dunst would take a fancy to an astronaut and
Alfred Molina's Dr Octopus would indulge in much eight-legged freakery.
Directly after Spider-Man, Dunst would begin to branch out. After making
a fine job of comedy when hosting Saturday Night Live, she would join
Richard Harris and Anjelica Huston is lending her voice to Kaena: The
Prophecy (also known as AXIS), an ambitious French sci-fi animation
based on a video-game idea, Kirsten playing the Lara Croft-like
heroine.
Then there was Levity where Billy
Bob Thornton, jailed for 22 years for killing a teenaged clerk
during a robbery, returns home, seeking redemption, and begins a
relationship with Holly Hunter, not telling her he was responsible for
her brother's death. Meanwhile, preacher Morgan
Freeman is handing out redemption of his own down at his youth
centre, where Thornton finds work, Kirsten playing a girl on the verge
of losing herself to drugs and the downward spiral. It was a deliberate
and successful move into grittier territory.
Very much in demand, she was quickly back
into major motion pictures with Mike Newell's Mona Lisa Smile, seeing
her join forces with Julia
Roberts and Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Juliet Stevenson and Marcia
Gay Harden in the strongest female cast since The Hours. Here Roberts
played a progressive Californian teacher in 1953 who's employed at
preppy Massachusetts finishing school Wellesley College.
All the young women are looking forward
to becoming well-kept corporate wives, but Roberts encourages them to
seek a life and vision of their own, to the fury of Dunst's Betty Warren
who accuses her in the school paper of leading them to communism and
promiscuity. It was another excellent performance, Dunst portraying
Warren as edgy, insecure and tending towards cruelty and
viciousness.
Her battle and gradual transformation
would be the heart of the film, a kind of Dead Poets' Society for girls.
The movie would also bring her to a new relationship, Gyllenhaal
introducing Kirsten to her brother Jake at the beginning of 2003. The
pair would almost star together in Spider-Man 2 when Tobey Maguire
suffered back problems and was nearly replaced by Gyllenhaal.
She'd follow this with Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine Of The
Spotless Mind where Kate
Winslet undergoes professor Tom Wilkinson's revolutionary new
process to have all memory of boyfriend Jim
Carrey wiped from her mind. Carrey decides to copy her but changes
his mind, much to the chagrin of Wilkinson and his staff. These include Elijah
Wood, who's checking Carrey's memories to see how he can score with
Winslet himself, neurotic geek Mark Ruffalo, and receptionist and nurse
Kirsten, who's having an affair with Ruffalo but would rather be seeing
Wilkinson. It was crazy, convoluted, visionary stuff.
Following Spider-Man 2, as if to test herself physically as well as
mentally, Kirsten moved on to Wimbledon, playing the rising star and bad
girl of the women's circuit, Paul Bettany featuring as a faded hero who
has one last chance to win a major, as well as Kirsten's heart.
Then would come Cameron Crowe's
Elizabethtown, where Orlando
Bloom would turn suicidal after losing millions of his shoe
company's money and being dumped by his girlfriend. Then, meeting
hostess Kirsten on the way home to his father's funeral, he would be
presented with a chance of redemption.
Kirsten Dunst is famous in the industry for keeping her family close and
her feet on the ground. Having transformed herself from a cutesy model
into a respected actress, she will soon be noted for a thespian prowess
that stretches beyond the teen comedy genre she has so dominated. She'll
be around for good - just wait and see. ~ Dominic Wills
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