Stanley Kubrick may well be the only film director in history capable of creating a legendarily frightening movie scene consisting of nothing more than a kid riding a Big Wheel and two little girls. Even before the flash cut to the scene showing the little girls butchered and bloody, the scene in The Shining succeeded in being seared into the collective unconscious of generations of moviegoers.
If those guys on Ghost Hunters ever turned a corner and saw two little girls who looked like the twins from The Shining, I guarantee two things: 1) The ratings for that episode would dwarf the “Who Shot J.R.” episode of Dallas, and 2), at least one of the Ghost Hunters would crap in his or her pants. (I’m going with Tango.) Those Shining twins were played by a pair of real life twins named Lisa and Louise Burns and they may very well hold the record for the memorable film characters with the least amount of actual film time.
They doubtlessly hold the record for being actors most famous for being on screen the least amount of time; neither made another movie after The Shining. Instead, the lure of higher education enticed them both-as well as Danny Llloyd, the kid in the Big Wheel. Lisa Burns earned a degree in Literature, while both her sister and Danny became microbiologists.
Merrick Buttrick is famous to most people either for playing Johnny Slash on the only television show that Sarah Jessica Parker should be remembered for, Square Pegs, or for playing the son of the captain of the Starship Enterprise, James T. Kirk, in the second Star Trek movie The Wrath of Khan.
Frankly, I preferred his New Wave goofball Johnny Slash. He possessed an excellent sense of timing and should definitely have gone on to bigger things. Tragically, his career spanned only those wild and wooly 80s that saw his rise and fall. He developed Aids and in 1989 died of brain cancer.
Did you know you can catch syndicated reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess on Oxygen. This is a show that centered on Xena and her sidekick/partner/longtime companion Gabrielle, of course, but also provided an extraordinary number of memorable supporting characters from Autolycus to Joxer and from Calisto to Aphrodite.
One key ingredient to the success and mythology of Xena: Warrior Princess was the character of Ares, the God of War. Ares and Xena had a complex relationship; he had seduced her to the dark side and spent most of the show’s history trying to woo her back.
Obviously in love with Xena, Ares could not simply kill her, though he certainly had the power. In the hands of a lesser actor, Ares could easily have come across as smarmy, smug and even a little boring. In the hands of Kevin Tod Smith, however, Ares was always unpredictable. You never knew whether he would respond with a half-turn of his head and a laugh, or by unleashing the extent of his godly powers.
Kevin Tod Smith, even more so Merrick Buttrick, seemed a sure thing to find a career in movies. He was good looking, could do both drama and comedy, and made Matt Damon look like Wally Cox in the bodily department. Unfortunately, in 2002 Kevin Tod Smith was filming a movie in China when he fell from the top of tall set and died.
Although not nearly as tragic as Kevin Tod Smith or Merritt Buttrick’s story…probably…the sick, sad story of Jaimee Foxworth. If you began watching Family Matters later in the show’s trajectory toward becoming the Steven Q. Urkel Story-thankfully, I might add-you may have been shocked to discover that the Winslow family originally had two daughters. The younger daughter was played by Jaimee Foxworth and in one episode she went upstairs and was never seen again. Several years later, she popped up again in a quite different set of circumstances.
Apparently, the money Foxworth received from Family Matters never saw its way into her own bank account. Destitute and desperate, Jaimee Foxworth took the screen name Crave and began appearing in hardcore sex films. You hate to see anyone fall into that line of work, but when you consider that those same producers who unceremoniously dropped her apparently did nothing to help her out, it just goes to show that you may want to reconsider letting your own children get involved in the acting business.
