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A pretty, rambunctious child actress who began acting in commercials at the age of four, Thora Birch appeared opposite Wilford Brimley (in 14 Quaker Oats spots) and Jimmy Stewart (for Campbell's Soup), not to mention turning up in the "Just Say No" to drugs campaign. Early in her career, when she was a pretty blonde moppet, she was billed simply as 'Thora' in such efforts as her regular series roles in "Day by Day" (NBC, 1988-89) and "Parenthood" (NBC, 1990) and for her feature acting debut "Purple People Eater" (1988). The tot utilized her full name in the role that first attracted real attention, the precocious young neighbor of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith in "Paradise" (1991), which she followed with the hollow holiday-themed "All I Want for Christmas" (also 1991). Birch went on to portray Harrison Ford's daughter in the thriller "Patriot Games" (1992), then appeared as one of three children who must contend with a trio of witches in the Disney comedy "Hocus Pocus" (1993).Birch joined the ranks of child film stars when she carried the family adventure "Monkey Trouble" (1994), holding her own opposite a rascally monkey and an irascible Harvey Keitel. She reprised her role as Ford's daughter...
A pretty, rambunctious child actress who began acting in commercials at the age of four, Thora Birch appeared opposite Wilford Brimley (in 14 Quaker Oats spots) and Jimmy Stewart (for Campbell's Soup), not to mention turning up in the "Just Say No" to drugs campaign. Early in her career, when she was a pretty blonde moppet, she was billed simply as 'Thora' in such efforts as her regular series roles in "Day by Day" (NBC, 1988-89) and "Parenthood" (NBC, 1990) and for her feature acting debut "Purple People Eater" (1988). The tot utilized her full name in the role that first attracted real attention, the precocious young neighbor of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith in "Paradise" (1991), which she followed with the hollow holiday-themed "All I Want for Christmas" (also 1991). Birch went on to portray Harrison Ford's daughter in the thriller "Patriot Games" (1992), then appeared as one of three children who must contend with a trio of witches in the Disney comedy "Hocus Pocus" (1993).
Birch joined the ranks of child film stars when she carried the family adventure "Monkey Trouble" (1994), holding her own opposite a rascally monkey and an irascible Harvey Keitel. She reprised her role as Ford's daughter in the sequel "Clear and Present Danger" (1994) before playing the wild girl who grows up to be Melanie Griffith in the coming-of-age film "Now and Then" (1995). She subsequently traveled to British Columbia to portray a teenager searching for her missing father in the adventure "Alaska" (1996). Hitting an awkward age, Birch more or less retreated from acting for a couple of years, although she kept her toe in with guest appearances on the CBS series "Touched By an Angel" and its spin-off "Promised Land". By 1999, though, with darker hair, she had resumed her career, gaining notice as Everyteen Clea in the thoughtful and sensitive "Hallmark Hall of Fame" presentation "Night Rider Home" (CBS), an examination of a family coping with grief. But it was her big-screen turn as the angst-ridden daughter of Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening in that year's Academy Award-winning Best Picture "American Beauty" that kicked her career to a new level. Appearing in a somewhat controversial topless scene (she turned 17 during the film's shoot), Birch created a memorable portrait of a disaffected teenage girl. She almost blew it with her follow-up choices, though. Neither her turn as a punk rocker who suggests who dares her older sister and two of her friends to play a game of Russian Roulette in the festival-screened, direct-to-video release "The Smokers" nor her work as the democratically-minded Empress Savina in the laughable "Dungeons and Dragons" (2000) pleased critics and viewers. On the other hand, both reviewers and audiences embraced Birch in her next role as Enid, the eccentric, somewhat negative, bespectacled teen hipster and aspiring artist struggling to find herself after high school graduation, in "Ghost World", the Terry Zwigoff-directed black comedy based on a graphic novel. That same year, British audiences watched her play an English girl who accompanies classmates into an abandoned WWII bunker from which only one will emerge in the mystery-thriller "The Hole".
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Notes
Her parents were expecting a boy, whom they would have named Thor. Instead, they added an "a" to feminize Thor, learning later that Thora is actually a Norse goddess, the sister of Thor and ruler of Thursday.
Birch holds a blue belt in karate.
Her official fan Web site is at thora.org.
"At 24 I want to be a director. Then I want to go into ice skating for a year and then be a cop for year and then I would like to go back to directing and then I would like to be a singer." --Thora Birch quoted in Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1991.
On changing the world: "I think we should decompress it, knock it down, and then restructure the whole thing from the bottom up again. Recently there was something on the news about how amphibians are becoming extinct and it caught me off guard how much I was upset by it. One of my friends said, 'You're nuts crying about a freaking lizard!' But at the time, it just messed me up." --Birch to Dominique Swain in Interview, October 1999.
"She does not give of herself easily. She is not good at presenting herself as a package. You really have to burrow quite deep with Thora. But then it was that sense of hidden depths that was so fascinating to me." --"American Beauty" director Sam Mendes quoted in The Daily Telegraph, November 24, 2001.
Mendes defended Birch to The Daily Telegraph reporter Emma Forrest when Forrest had a difficult interview with the actress: "Oh, dear. Thora was in one of those moods. ... Look, she's a complicated girl, a complicated woman now. She has clearly been a troubled soul and I couldn't say what that is about because there is this kind of force field around her that stops you from going there. But that confusion and unease she has about herself is precisely what makes her so fascinating to watch." --From The Daily Telegraph, November 24, 2001.
About her nude scene in "American Beauty": "I wasn't nervous about it. I thought I'd be a mess. But when it came to it, it wasn't a lascivious moment--not titilating." --Birch to London's Evening Standard, January 27, 2000.
"I just pick characters that I fall in love with for some reason. I haven't really given my choices any grand thought in terms of what I'm doing with my career. But you also can't ignore what you're doing career-wise. I'd like to play the 'typical' parts. I just haven't done them yet. Maybe I've made a mistake because two of the characters that I've played are troubled. That could be a big mistake, because everyone sees me that way, and I'm not that way." --Birch quoted in Venice, August 2001.
"I don't get pleasure watching my own work, but when other people are affected in a positive way by it, that to me is the highest compliment. It's my job to move people, so when that happens I am supremely happy."-Birch Interview November 2002
"I've sometimes wondered why people, especially in the entertainment industry, maintain this sort of reverence for entertainers from the past. And I think that that passion is sustained because there's an element of the unknown attached to it-the not knowing every aspect of these people or their methods, their likes or dislikes or what they do at home. I think that when that mystery is diminished in an artist, whether it's through seeing so much of them or becoming aware of them on a visual and therefore vaguely physical level, it diminishes that love, and I don't like being part of diminishing that love in my fans' eyes."-Birch Interview November 2002
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