People: Welcome to the Fanning club
Try as you might, you will never catch Dakota Fanning admitting what seems obvious to everyone, except maybe her.
“I just love my job,” says Fanning, who at age 12 is a veteran actor with more than 30 TV appearances and feature film credits, including her newest, “Charlotte’s Web.”
“I really, really never think about somehow being special or more gifted than other girls my age, you know? It’s just not me. It’s not who I am.”
Unlike most kids her age, Fanning does not pepper her sentences with “like” or “you know.” In discussing her decision to play Fern, the young farm girl in “Charlotte’s Web” who adopts a runt-of-the-litter pig named Wilbur, she’s thoroughly articulate.
“It was a little daunting to play a character everyone knows from the book by E.B. White, who was such a great writer,” says Fanning.
“It was a big responsibility, so I wanted to make sure my Fern would be a Fern people felt they knew. But the director told me to play her the way I felt her to be, so that was helpful. It was also nice that I was part of such a big ensemble.”
That includes Kevin Anderson and Essie Davis as Fern’s parents, and Beau Bridges as the family doctor who convinces them that her relationship with animals is not only normal but healthy.
But the real co-stars are Wilbur’s fellow barn residents, who, when Fern is away, talk (and argue) among themselves.
They include two bossy cows named Bitsy and Betsy (voiced by Kathy Bates and Reba McEntire); an erudite sheep (John Cleese); a goose (Oprah Winfrey) and her gander (Cedric the Entertainer); a philosophical horse (Robert Redford); two not-so-canny crows (Andre Benjamin and Thomas Haden Church); and Charlotte (Julia Roberts), a gentle spider who weaves a plot to keep Wilbur off the chopping block.
Outkast singer/composer Benjamin calls Fanning “one of a kind.”
“(S)he’s like so real, in all her films, it doesn’t look like acting at all, which is the point,” he says.
When comic Kathy Griffin made a joke about Fanning going through her first drug rehab (which of course she didn’t), former “Dreamer” co-star Kris Kristofferson was so angry he had to be calmed down by his young son.
“This kid can not only blow actors of real stature off the screen, she’s so good, and not only is she one of the most professional and prepared actors I’ve ever worked with, she’s also just a great kid,” Kristofferson says.
Fanning, who hopes to try her hand at directing someday, keeps her success in perspective.
“I want to do normal kid stuff, too. I want to go to college like Jodie Foster did,” she says. “But I want to be an actor all my life, if I can. I hope I’m still getting good roles to play when I’m 80.”
The birthday bunch
“Penthouse” publisher Bob Guccione is 76. Actor George Lindsey (Goober on “The Andy Griffith Show”) is 71. Actor-comedian Eugene Levy is 60. Actor Barry Livingston (“My Three Sons”) is 53. Actor Sean Patrick Thomas (“The District”) is 36. Actor Giovanni Ribisi is 32. Actress Milla Jovovich is 31.