Nipped in the Bud

BROOKE SHIELDS

The odds that she'd make the transition from beautiful baby to teen star to adult actress were never great, but Brooke's early fame, as America's premier sexualized infant--in toney trash like Pretty Baby, drive-in trash like The Blue Lagoon, and in lip-smackingly trashy TV commercials for Calvin Klein jeans--gave her a fifty-fifty chance of growing up to become a beloved pin-up, sort of a brunette Farrah Fawcett, instead of just a joke. Shields is a case study that proves the old studio system, which really did work pretty well, is no more: compare her career with two earlier child stars also appreciated for their beauty, not their acting ability--Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood. Movie moguls of yore knew that the chances of having an aging teen contract player successfully make the jump to leading lady were not likely, so when the time came they really protected their investment with heavy duty acting classes, solid material, and a top director: thus, Taylor passed the test of A Place in the Sun with flying colors, and Wood came out of Splendor in the Grass with a grown-up's career.

But Shields, in the free-for-all modern movie world where one's mother decides on the next career move, stumbled badly with her bid for adult stardom, Endless Love. With a bad screenplay and terrible direction by Franco Zeffirelli, this was a star vehicle that exposed the inabilities of its star. A near career-ender for all concerned, it was Shields's last major studio movie to date. She's since been making Cannon fodder like Sahara, unreleasable tripe like Brenda Starr, and too many appearances on Bob Hope TV specials. The irony cannot be lost on Shields that when her young life inspired a TV movie called "Paper Dolls," playing a character transparently based on Shields launched the career of another young beauty who today has the very career Shields seemed destined for: Daryl Hannah.

K.H.

LEA THOMPSON

Although she didn't start acting until she was 20, Lea Thompson, now 28, has never been prominent on screen as anything but a teen. And her ever-shrinking role in the Back to the Future series suggests a Margot Kidder/Superman replay. The situation wasn't always so dire. Thompson won raves as the tough-but-virginal steel town girl in 1983's All the Right Moves, giving it up to Tom Cruise. But then her love scene was cut from 1984's Red Dawn because she was "too young" (at 22). The next year, she became a name, playing dual roles as Michael J. Fox's mom now-and-then. She was on the fast track, all right--straight to Mary Pickford-ville (remember Pickford? America's sweetheart, still playing 12-year-olds at 27, because that's what the public demanded?). She got her shot at carrying a film, but--alas--the film was Howard the Duck. Soon she was playing just another high school sweetheart in John Hughes's Some Kind of Wonderful.This kind of type-casting will pressure a "maturing"actress into taking some chances: In 1988's abysmal Casual Sex?, she played a promiscuous young woman,and in The Wizard of Loneliness she played a woman with a kid--and a bearded lover. Last year on TV in "Tales From the Crypt", she played a prostitute who succumbs to a mysterious malady that ages her onscreen. But when the heavy makeup came off, she was as fresh-faced as ever. It must have been maddening to watch another fresh-faced cutie pie, Meg Ryan, come along and steal the show in mature comic roles in When Harry Met Sally... and Joe vs. the Volcano.

Today Thompson languishes in TV movies, while Meg's got the career that might have been Thompson's (as well as Dennis Quaid--Thompson's former fiance). Thompson has gone out of her way to remind the press that Lauren Bacall played mature roles opposite Bogie while still a teen. But she simply doesn't possess the same sultry, slow-burn charisma, or the throaty voice. You just can't imagine anyone calling her, as James Agee did Bacall, "the toughest girl... Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while." Maybe she should take up smoking.

J.S.

BO DEREK

Bo Derek came out of absolutely nowhere (being chomped in two by Orca the killer whale) to play the title role in 10, in which Dudley Moore tries to assuage his middle-aged malaise with a fantasy about a magnificent young woman--the perfect "10." Who was this quintessential California golden girl? It turned out she had been plucked off the beach at 16 by older actor/director/Svengali John Derek, who made her lose 30 pounds, and then made her his third wife. (He had previously been married to Ursula Andress and Linda Evans, both of whom could have passed for Bo's mother.) Derek made it clear that he was going to carefully plot Bo's career path, turning her into the star she was obviously meant to be. Of course, he hadn't exactly put the careers of Andress or Evans in orbit (Evans got her "Dynasty" gig long after she'd divorced Derek), but he was determined that the third time would be the charm.

With the exception of a hot-tub appearance in the little-seen movie A Change of Seasons, Bo was held off the market for two years so that she could make a bigger splash with a vehicle Derek fashioned just for her: Jane, the "first jungle feminist," in their laughably terrible Tarzan the Ape Man. Bo and John laid low until their next project in 1984, Bolero, another Derek-directed film in which Bo improbably plays a virgin who (and this is the plot) can't get deflowered. Ugly rumors emanated from the set, boding poorly for the chemistry between Bo and co-star Andrea Occhipinti (it was said she wouldn't kiss him because he had cold-sores on his mouth). The Dereks produced another camp classic, and--why break up a winning team?--try to go three-for-three with their new film, Ghosts Can't Do It. The title says it all.

M.A.

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