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Sunday Magazine
Sunday January 13 2008, by Tiffany Bakker
Family Ties

So far, there have been no trips to rehab, no bitter bust-ups between feuding parents and no celebrity spats. Rather, here's a family that appears to be 'normal' and just happens to include two freakishly talented sisters. Dakota Fanning, 13, first came to prominence when she stole the show from Sean Penn (no mean feat) as a seven-year-old in the acclaimed I Am Sam, after which she became the youngest person ever to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award. She followed that up by working with Hollywood heavyweights Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg in War of the Worlds, before coming Down Under to film the children's classic Charlotte's Web. But, as Dakota heads into puberty, her nine-year-old sister, Elle, is taking up the baton of Hollywood's favourite kid.

Like so many other showbiz siblings, Elle got her start playing a younger version of her real-life sister, first in a television mini-series, Taken, and then again in I Am Sam. At the age of four, Elle snared her first part independent of her sister in the pointless Eddie Murphy flick, Daddy Day Care. Then came the Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger weepy The Door in the Floor, in a part that, initially, was meant to be shared by identical twins - until the tiny star's audition knocked the socks off the producers. She then went on to play the role of Debbie, the child of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett's characters in Babel. Currently in post-production is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Elle again teams up with Pitt and Blanchett (nice work if you can get it). Next up, though, she'll star alongside her sister in the adaptation of popular novelist Jodie Picoult's My Sister's Keeper.

The way it's going for these two sisters, they're more likely to follow in the footsteps of say, someone like a Jodie Foster, who successfully made the transition from child star to adult roles. Thank God for the Fannings!

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