Profile/Lindsay Lohan:Undeniably talented but with an unfortunate taste for partying, the former child star risks following in the footsteps of Judy Garland rather than Jodie Foster, writes Donald Clarke
Thirty years ago, we knew what to expect from the afterlife of our child stars. They could drink themselves into podgy decrepitude like Judy Garland. They could become serial marriage addicts like Elizabeth Taylor. They could take on an eerily inhuman aspect in the manner of Roddy McDowall. A few wise eggs, such as Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, stepped away from the industry and found stability.
Most of the rest seemed doomed to grotesque decline.
Then Jodie Foster, star of Taxi Driverand Freaky Friday, demonstrated a third way. After securing her high school diploma, she took a good degree at Yale before returning to win Oscars and live an ordered life. Thoughtful successors such as Julia Stiles and Claire Danes have since followed her sober example.
Lindsay Lohan, who took on the Foster role in a fine 2003 remake of Freaky Friday, appears to have initiated a one-woman campaign to restore the bad reputation of the superannuated juvenile star. Over the past five years or so, no tabloid has felt able to go to print without a picture of Li-Lo collapsing theatrically out of a nightclub with a bottle of booze in one hand and an unsuitable man in the other. She has been accused of suffering from an eating disorder. She has failed to turn up for film shoots. Now, this is how wild children are supposed to behave.
Lohan's most spectacular catastrophes have involved acute automotive disharmony. During 2005 alone she was involved in three car crashes: a minor rear-ending, a direct hit on a van and a smash-up with a photographer's vehicle.
Those incidents, however, seem minor when set beside this year's brace of traffic violations. On May 26th, Lohan lost control of her Mercedes and, after ploughing into a blameless hedge, promptly abandoned the car and the small, incriminating pile of white powder within. Following a period in rehab, she revealed the alcohol-monitoring bracelet on her leg and announced her determination to embrace the clean life.
The reformation was predictably short-lived. Earlier this week, Lohan, now 21, was arrested in a Santa Monica parking lot after becoming involved in a slanging match with the mother of a former assistant. The woman had phoned the police to report a car - Li-Lo's as it transpired - pursuing her own in a speedy and erratic fashion.
Lohan refused to take the breathalyser, but then failed the preliminary drink-driving tests that Californian police are entitled to impose (touching your nose, walking in a straight line and so forth). She was later discovered to be over the limit and, more seriously, to have a small portion of cocaine in her pocket. "I am innocent," she said later. "I did not do drugs. They're not mine. I was almost hit by my assistant Tarin's mom. I appreciate everyone giving me my privacy." The judge had better believe her. Following the media outcry at the initial early release of Paris Hilton, the Californian penal authorities may, if she is found guilty, feel pressure to demonstrate their blindness towards celebrity.
Mention of Hilton might cause some readers, already simmering with righteous anger, to finally crumple up the newspaper and flush it down the toilet. Why should we care if these silly young girls want to savage their good names and poison their own futures? The Irish Timeshas, surely, better things to do than chronicle the lives of those who are famous merely for being infamous.
Lohan is, however, a significantly more fascinating figure than the catalogue of excess above may suggest. During the early part of this decade, she became one member of a gang of child actors - Amanda Bynes and Hilary Duff were her main rivals - whose dizzying popularity with young girls transformed certain corners of the entertainment industry. As the years progressed, it quickly became clear that Lohan was by far the most talented of the bunch. Nuanced, mature performances in pictures such as Freaky Friday, in which she and Jamie Lee Curtis switched bodies, and Mean Girls, where her naive character coped with various high-school cliques, suggested that she had the capacity to thrive as an adult performer.
Robert Altman, one of the most distinguished directors in the US, clearly felt she had oodles of potential and cast her in his final film, last year's A Prairie Home Companion. She was also seen to advantage in Bobby, Emilio Estevez's pretentious examination of events surrounding the death of Bobby Kennedy, and, were it not for unhappy accidents on the highways of southern California, would now be properly established as a mainstream star.
WHAT WENT WRONG? Lindsay Dee Lohan was born in the Bronx on July 2nd, 1986, and raised in Long Island by her mother, Dina, and her father, Michael. By the age of three she was already signed to the Ford talent agency, but her freckles and red hair initially failed to impress an industry dedicated to furthering near-Aryan ideals of childhood beauty. She and her parents persevered and she eventually secured a series of commercials for Toys 'R' Us. In 1996 she landed a part on Another World, a prominent soap opera, and has never looked back. Dual roles as very different twins in Disney's The Parent Trapfollowed in 1998. By the turn of the century she was closing in on proper fame.
To this point, official profiles of Lohan tended to highlight the ordinariness of her parents and the unremarkable nature of her upbringing. But it soon emerged that her father, a former Wall Street executive, had received a four-year prison sentence for securities fraud when she was just a toddler. Michael Lohan, a native of Co Galway, sounds like a colourful figure. Long separated from Lindsay's mother - indeed, the recipient of a restraining order - he was arrested after punching Mrs Lohan's brother on her front lawn in 2004. Later that year, he passed out drunk in a strip club and was charged with beating up a garbage man who, he claimed, had blocked his car.
Amateur psychologists have, understandably enough, rifled through Michael's troubled history for the roots of Lindsay's own misbehaviour. Others have wondered whether the young actor's success might have driven her estranged father over the edge and into psychological meltdown.
"Ha ha! Well, I feel like sometimes if I wasn't involved with this, it wouldn't be like that," she said in 2005. "But my dad's a grown man and he's acted very irrationally because of overuse of certain substances. I love him because he's my dad, but I don't respect him as a person." During that interview, Lohan made the first of several periodic attempts to assure her public that she had left debauchery behind her. But a year later, when shooting the drama Georgia Rulealongside such luminaries as Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman, she began turning up late, forgetting her lines and generally making a nuisance of herself.
Public humiliation came when, in a highly uncharacteristic move for a producer, James Robinson, the head of Morgan Creek Pictures, released a statement chastising his own star.
"You and your representatives have told us that your various late arrivals and absences from the set have been the result of illness," he fumed. "Today we were told it was 'heat exhaustion'. We are well aware that your ongoing all-night heavy partying is the real reason for your so-called 'exhaustion'." Later, the actor William H Macy, Huffman's husband and a gentleman of the old school, made his own contribution to the debate. "I think what an actor has to realise is that when you show up an hour late, 150 people have been scrambling to cover for you," he told reporters. "There is not an apology big enough in the world to have to make 150 people scramble."
Once again, Lohan went before reporters to express contrition and offer her promise to sin no more. But, despite the periods in rehab and the conspicuous damage to her career, she appears unable to get back on the path laid out by Foster.
COULD A SPELL in prison do the trick? Jail eventually sorted out Robert Downey Jr, another talented actor who enjoyed drink, drugs and debauchery, but it took a decade of turmoil before he finally received that short, sharp shock and, even now, producers quake at the insurance bills his name on the cast list precipitates.
The latest trauma has already caused headaches for one batch of marketing men. Lindsay was supposed to appear on Jay Leno's chat show last week to promote I Know Who Killed Me, her latest thriller, but, at the last minute, was replaced by Rob Schneider. The appalling comedian, wearing a black dress and a blonde wig, proceeded to deliver a truly grisly impersonation of the young actress. If that unlovely vista isn't enough to get her back on the straight and narrow then she may very well be doomed to professional oblivion.
The Lohan File
Who is she?Talented actor (and, briefly, pop singer) who, after establishing herself as a juvenile star in remakes of The Parent Trap, Freaky Fridayand Herbie Fully Loaded, has recently taken adult roles in pictures such as Bobbyand A Prairie Home Companion.
Why is she in the news?Half a decade of boozing, automotive irresponsibility and suspicious sniffing came to a head this week when she was arrested for drunk driving and possession of cocaine.
Most appealing characteristicPersuasively unaffected manner on screen, which, despite her unprofessional attitude to work, identifies her as a star with long-term potential.
Least appealing characteristicWhere to begin? Directors might say her slack timekeeping. The police would argue for her cavalier approach to the drug laws. The owners of several now insecure hedges and walls in southern California may plump for her erratic driving.
Most likely to say"Here, hold my glass while I change gear. Whaddya mean 'hedge'? What hedge where? Ha ha! Look no hands." (Noise of metal ploughing through vegetation follows.)
Least likely to say"I couldn't possibly. I have to be up early tomorrow morning."