Christina Ricci's career still growing

Gill Pringle
June 12, 2008 12:00am

MAKING her splashy big-screen debut opposite Cher and Winona Ryder in Mermaids, aged nine, Christina Ricci has since starred in 40 more movies.

An unconventional-looking child, Ricci's expansive forehead and huge eyes initially typecast her as an oddball in family films The Addams Family and Casper, but by the age of 15 she had shaken off preconceptions with a small role in Anjelica Huston's harrowing tale of child abuse, Bastard Out of Carolina.

Before leaving her teens she had turned in complex performances as Kevin Kline's nymphomaniac daughter in The Ice Storm; as a laundromat worker who finds instant fame in John Waters' sweetly subversive comedy Pecker; and as a manipulative teen who seduces her gay brother's lover in The Opposite of Sex, earning a Golden Globe nomination in the process.

But though family problems and substance abuse caused the adult careers of many a former child star to falter – notably Home Alone's Macaulay Culkin and The Parent Trap's Lindsay Lohan – Ricci has shimmied effortlessly through her coming of age.

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