A child lead who never begs for our sympathy. Liesel Pritzker Simmons made three films between 1995 and 2000, and in the first, Cuarón's A Little Princess, she says the lines plainly, as a statement of fact rather than a speech. Then she left acting.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the moment in A Little Princess (1995) when Sara Crewe tells Miss Minchin to her face that every girl is a princess. Liesel Pritzker Simmons says it the way she might say that it is raining. Eleanor Bron's Minchin, jaw clenched hard enough to crack a nut, is the one who reacts, and the scene is hers to lose. We had braced ourselves to wince at that line, and we did not, and the reason is that Pritzker Simmons treats it as information rather than as a plea.
She had not done much when Alfonso Cuarón cast her, a stage Scout in Chicago and little else, and he chose her, by his own account, for her calm rather than her polish. It was the right instinct. Cuarón's film is green and gold and unhurried, and a busier child at the centre would have curdled it into sweetness. Instead there is a girl who tells stories to the other boarders because she likes stories, not because the film needs us to see how special she is, and who takes her reversals with a stillness that makes them worse to watch. It is the reason the film's cardboard villain and lucky last act do not sink it.
What followed was brief. Air Force One (1997) put her opposite Harrison Ford as Alice Marshall, the president's daughter, a part that asks her to be frightened and to be worth rescuing; Ford, who did the rescuing, thought her the real thing. Blast (2000) was the last of it. Three films in five years, then nothing, and nothing by choice. She said in 1995, while promoting the film that made her name: "I don't think I want to become a huge actress or anything. And I wouldn't make it a career. It would still be a hobby." Few children mean that. She did.
So there is no arc to trace, no late phase, no wrong turn into franchise work. There is one performance, and it holds up because it has none of the habits child performances acquire once the child has been told she is good at it. She was never told for long enough for it to stick. A Little Princess shows what an untrained, unfrightened child looks like when a patient director points a camera at her, and one film of it turned out to be enough.
Biography
Liesel Pritzker Simmons, also known by the stage name Liesel Matthews, is an American former child actress and heiress. She was born Liesel Anne Pritzker on 14 March 1984 in Chicago, Illinois.
She made her film debut as Sara Crewe in A Little Princess (1995), directed by Alfonso Cuarón. She subsequently appeared as Alice Marshall in Air Force One (1997) and in Blast (2000). Her stage work includes a Theatre World Award-winning performance in Vincent in Brixton.
A member of the Pritzker family, she later pursued impact investing. She co-founded the Blue Haven Initiative and attended Columbia University.
