Shue finds family film a good fit
It’s always complicated, being part of a family. Even more so when you’re the only girl in a family of four kids. And when the oldest brother, the golden child, dies tragically young.
And when, almost 20 years later, your other brother says he wants to make a movie about that loss and he wants you to be in it and wants your famous husband to direct.
But Elisabeth Shue is pretty sure she did the right thing. Girls keep showing up in soccer jerseys and asking what it was like to play on a team with all boys, and their mothers say thank you after seeing the new film, “Gracie.”
Shue’s oldest brother, Will, died in an accident in 1988 at age 26. He was, she says, like a surrogate parent – the one who watched out for her in the tussle of a sports-centered, testosterone-driven family.
“That was such a big part of the story – showing what it’s like to lose the person who protected you in your life. And what it’s like to carry on after something like that happened,” she says. “I wanted to make sure that was very sensitively and respectfully done.”
It was Andrew Shue‘s idea. The former “Melrose Place” star wanted to make an underdog movie about, and for, his late brother.
He began working on a script and broached the topic with Elisabeth, their other brother, John, and Elisabeth’s husband, Davis Guggenheim – whose career was about to skyrocket with the release of his Al Gore documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Initially the script was a fictional story about a boy based on Will Shue, but as family discussions of the project grew more serious, Guggenheim pushed to steer it more toward the truth and to tell it from the person he saw as the real underdog of the family: Elisabeth.
The result is a tale about a wounded teenage girl who fights her way onto the boys’ varsity soccer team in the late 1970s, taking the place of a brother who died in a car accident.
Elisabeth Shue, just four months from giving birth to her third child, was anxious about acting in front of her family (she plays the mother in the story, and Andrew plays a soccer coach) and being able to take direction from her husband.
She says the film is “80 to 85 percent completely true” to their own experiences, though events have been rearranged and characters have been tweaked.
She was 24 when her brother died after falling from a tree; in the movie; Gracie is just 15. Shue was the only girl on a soccer team full of boys throughout most of her elementary school years, but she gave up the sport at 13 to pursue gymnastics and didn’t go back to it until her senior year in college.
Still, she insists, the emotional journey and the family dynamics are distinctly hers.
“The theme of the movie, being a girl trying to be seen as an equal, was very much what it was like growing up in my family,” she says.
She is bracing herself now for the critical response to the film, even as she revels in the cheers from those little girls in soccer jerseys.
“Those reactions have made me feel like it was the right thing to do,” she says.
The birthday bunch
Actor Bruce Dern is 71. Singer Gordon Waller (Peter and Gordon) is 62. Actor Parker Stevenson is 55. Singer El DeBarge is 46. Actor Scott Wolf (“Party of Five”) is 39. Comedian Horatio Sanz is 38. Actor Noah Wyle is 36. Actress Angelina Jolie is 32.