People: She really is just an American girl
Interviewing Abigail Breslin is a good-news, bad-news experience.
The good news is that for all of her success in Hollywood, she still comes across as what she is: a 12-year-old girl.
There’s no artificial air of a showbiz automaton. No blank gaze of a soul-deadened celebrity on press-tour autopilot.
The bad news is that talking to her is like talking to any youngster. You can see she’s trying hard to be attentive, but she’s fidgety.
She looks down and around a lot and tends to respond to questions with a few words, in answers that invariably boil down to “Yes,” “No” or “Kind of but not really.”
For instance: Her new movie, “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl” (opening Wednesday), is an evocative depiction of Depression-era America, offering all kinds of intimate vignettes of the hardships people endured.
As the plucky Kit, Abigail portrays a young girl whose family is torn apart when Dad (Chris O’Donnell) loses his job and heads to Chicago in hopes of finding work.
Mom, meanwhile, has to turn the family home into a boardinghouse while Kit watches friends and classmates fall into homelessness and poverty.
It must be pretty rough to put yourself in that kind of situation. It seems as if it would be kind of, you know, depressing.
“Yeah, all the scenes having to do with that kind of stuff were sad to do,” says Abigail.
“But there was some fun stuff to do in the movie, so that’s good.”
Fortunately, there’s an adult we can turn to: director Patricia Rozema.
“You know kids have a much stronger ‘receive’ mode than a ‘send’ mode,” Rozema says. “They can take it all in, but they can’t really articulate it.
“Abigail was completely receptive and emotionally available. I would just talk to her and ask her, ‘If this happened to you, what would you feel,’ and she would just go with it.
“As an actor, she’s as natural as can be. She can cry, but she doesn’t like to because she really feels it.”
So Abigail is more of an intuitive actor; she doesn’t really want to discuss her “process.”
What else do you talk about with a girl who has been working since she was 3 and at the tender age of 12 has already been nominated for her profession’s highest honor, a supporting-actress Oscar for 2006’s “Little Miss Sunshine”?
She loves the American Girl dolls that provided the inspiration for “Kit Kittredge” (“I have every single one”) and is home-schooled (“so I can just get out of bed at noon if I want to and then go to school”).
How about fame? It’s hard enough to deal with when you’re an adult. But what’s it like as a child?
“Everybody’s been nice so far,” Abigail says. “So if everybody’s nice, then it’s fine.”
And there you have it: The state of fame and celebrity life in American culture summed up in a dozen words – one for every year Abigail has been a part of it.
The birthday bunch
Singer Lena Horne is 91. Jazz bassist Stanley Clarke is 57. Actor David Alan Grier is 53. Actor Vincent D’Onofrio is 49. Actress Deirdre Lovejoy (“The Wire”) is 46. Actress Monica Potter (“Boston Legal”) is 37. Actress Lizzy Caplan (“Mean Girls”) is 26. “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino is 24.