Dakota Fanning was the greatest American actress of the 2000s. You can trace the arc of the decade through her performances: “Scared Girl in Park” in 2001’s sex comedy Tomcats (her debut); the “missing white girl” paranoia of 2004’s Man on Fire and Steven Spielberg’s overwhelming September 11 allegory War of the Worlds in 2005; the hyper sexual misogynist media of 2007 dismissing Hounddog as “the Dakota Fanning rape movie;” and finally, Twilight: New Moon, the sequel where she was the guest star, guiding the latest craze of her generation through the multimillion dollar stratosphere.
Since 2010, Fanning and her sister, Elle, have chosen movies carefully and worked less than many of their contemporaries. There was nothing fun about going to the movies in the 2010s, we’d lost it, but there were some good movies and she was in the best of them: Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where she played a filthy and foul-mouthed Squeaky Fromme. Fanning, famous enough in 2009 to add to the value of an already successful franchise; Fanning, iconic enough to be cast against type in a Tarantino film just 10 years later.
Dakota Fanning, who never fell prey to the paparazzi or the press ready to swoop in at first signs of an addiction or a bad boyfriend or worse, is she gay? Is she crazy? Is she worth all this time and money? It’s easy to forget how aggressive and cruel American pop culture was towards young women and girls in the 2000s. Eating disorders flourished as Rolling Stone declared Lindsay Lohan “Hot, Ready, and Legal” and the MPAA continued to censor sex over violence. Would there ever be a pornographic orgy as in depth and intense as the first six Saw movies? Not likely, but if it had happened, it would’ve been the 2000s. It’s not implausible that the series could’ve gone American Pie, American Pie 2, American Wedding, American Pussy. But beyond the Neo Moral Majority of the Bush 43 administration, there just wasn’t any money putting fucking in movies anymore—maybe not since Crash in 1996.
How remarkable it is that Fanning never had any scandals, but even more special, so many movies that are revered (or at least remembered) today: Uptown Girls, Charlotte’s Web, Man on Fire, War of the Worlds, Coraline… and I Am Sam. Sean Penn’s 2001 turn as a mentally disabled man felt like a gag at the time, and while the movie is earnest and sensitive enough, it just plays as macabre comedy today. But Fanning is never untrue. She’s what makes wonky horror films like Hide and Seek so compelling—the kind of actress that makes you consider rewatching 2003’s The Cat in the Hat.
She had her first kiss while filming the opening scene of Sweet Home Alabama. It’s worth noting that Hounddog premiered the same year that Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan melted down. But Fanning, born in 1994, was safely entrenched from the increasingly perverted media that blasted photos of Lohan doing knife hits and candids of Spears’ genitals. If she had a partying phase, or a drug problem, or any lifestyle choice that might be considered a controversy in ever conservative Hollywood, we the people know nothing about it.
We just know Dakota Fanning from growing up.
The greatest American actress of the 2000s, our friend, our sister, a rock in rough times.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith