LINDSAY Lohan IN 9 ACTS

1 Screen Test, The Parent Trap 1997

t takes 40 seconds for it to become apparent that, even at 10 years old, the girl is special. In her screen test, she is playing one twin – Anne, who is English – and almost-convincingly playing another – Hallie, who was raised in California – and around that 40 second mark, she lets the work show, describing her sister as a “lovely girl” in such a way that the phrase sounds immediately, subtly misshapen in her mouth (“A lah-vley girl,” she trills. A Valley Girl would never). She stares at her father, who can never know that they are meeting for the first time, like she’s dazed, dopey with new love. It is 1997, and at this point Lindsay Lohan is still red haired, and a lah-vley girl herself. A decade later, when she enters rehab for the first time, her redheaded-ness will be cited as evidence that she is fiery, or sexual, rather than cheeky, and her preternatural-seeming brilliance will be rewritten as her having grown up too fast. Still, for now, she is a young girl with the soul of an adult, lacquering bad accents onto good ones with the care of a veteran actor, and laughing her perfect, tinkling laugh. “Miss Lohan, a Ford model at three and then a very busy 10-year-old on Janet Maslin writes,, “plays the dual role with apparent effortlessness and with so much forcefulness that she seems to have been taking shy violet lessons from Sharon Stone.”