Dakota Fanning and a controversial role
Despite her young age, Dakota Fanning already had several hits under her belt - I Am Sam and Man on Fire, among others - when the script for Hounddog (2007) and the offer of play Lewellen.
At that time she was 12 years old and had a challenge on the horizon: giving life to a girl who grows up in a dysfunctional family mired in poverty and who finds solace in the music of Elvis Presley for her misfortune. In the film, little Lewellen also suffers a rape.
As soon as it was released at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, the film sparked controversy: Deborah Kampneier, its director, was harshly criticized by religious and conservative groups for choosing a 12-year-old actress to represent the scene of a rape without use a double. Many people also targeted her mother and her representative for exposing her to such a scene, something that Fanning herself, despite her young age, did not tolerate.
“When they started attacking my mother, my agent and my teacher, who were all on set that day, I started to get angry,” she said after the Sundance premiere. “I can let other things go, but when people start talking about my mother, in my opinion, that's very bad... it's an attack and it's not fair. They hadn’t seen the movie,” she added. Fanning also talked about what it meant to her to go through the story of her character and took weight away from the controversial scene. “I loved the story of Elvis Presley. “I loved the fact that she was born in difficult circumstances and tried to survive them,” the actress said at the time, as reproduced by the Reuters news agency. And she added: “I like so many things about her that have nothing to do with having been abused.”
Kampmeier, for her part, defined Fanning at the time as an “old soul” who understood Lewellen's thoughts and emotions from the moment they first discussed her role.
Brooke Shields, the “pretty girl”
Brooke Shields was eleven years old when she starred in Pretty Girl (1978), Louis Malle's film that tells the story of a girl pro---tute in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century that includes kissing scenes with an adult man and N- scenes. Two years later, in 1980, she starred in The Blue Lagoon, the story of two young people who survive a shipwreck and arrive on a desert island, where they fall in love and go through her s---al awakening.
Both the characters of Violet and Emmeline Lestrange made Shields a symbol. The actress was barely 15 years old. What did it mean to her to star in those two films and how did she manage to move forward? She told it herself in the two-part documentary series The Story of Brooke Shields (Pretty Baby) and in the interviews she gave after its premiere. Although she suffered the impact of her characters -especially due to the objectification and s----lization to which she was exposed when she was still very young-, filming Pretty Girl was not a difficult process for her, despite the fact that the film was rated R-rated. 18 years in the United States and the United Kingdom and even banned in Canada and labeled “child pornography” by the press.
“I think it is the most beautiful film I have ever made. “It's the only real quality movie I've been in,” she acknowledged in an interview she gave earlier this year to The New Yorker. She also said that she was aware of what pro---tution meant despite her young age, but that the set was a “safe place” for her: “They always took me into account. I had education. I had a call sheet every day. There was order and people cared about me,” she said. On the other hand, she did complain about the long days of recording and the old shoes that hurt her feet and she explained that what marked her was not her characters but the repercussions and treatment of the press.
