A child actor who spoke Neil Simon's wisecracks as if she had earned them, and who was never asked to be cute. Her career as an adult barely happened, and she walked away from it at 25, on her own terms.
Fi1m perspective
Lucy McFadden in The Goodbye Girl (1977) is handed the same Neil Simon wisecracks as the adults, and the film's small mercy is what Quinn Cummings does not do with them. She does not lean in. She drops them flat, in the tone of a child who has been the sensible one in the flat for some time, and Herbert Ross never once asks her to be cute. A precocious ten-year-old in a Simon comedy is a hazard on the scale of a leaking roof. Cummings underplays her way past it.
The best scenes in the film belong to her and Richard Dreyfuss. He talks to Lucy as if she were a colleague, she takes it as no more than her due, and the two of them agree, quietly and more than once, that her mother is impossible. We braced for the small adult and expected to want her off the screen; instead, by the second of those conversations, we were waiting for the next one. Marsha Mason, who plays the mother, later remembered her as professional and consistent from an early age, and it shows: she can sit in a scene with Dreyfuss and not compete for it. We scored the film 68, and a fair share of that is hers.
That was the peak, and it came at ten. She had been working since seven, in commercials and then television, and after the film she spent three years on the drama series Family (1978–1980) as Annie Cooper, across 36 episodes. The 1980s brought guest spots, Remington Steele (1984) among them, and a regular part in the short-lived sitcom Hail to the Chief (1985), as the daughter of the first female American president. We have not reviewed any of it. What the record shows is a career that thinned once she stopped being a child, with Listen to Me (1989) among the last of the film roles, and then in 1992, at 25, she stopped.
She was frank about why. "I loved the bit between 'Action' and 'Cut.' I hated everything else." She has since written books and made a living by other means. The part she was good at, the child who is more grown-up than the grown-ups around her, has a shelf life of about four years. She used hers well and then found something else to do, which is more than the trade usually arranges for the children it borrows.
Biography
Quinn Cummings is an American former child actress, author, humourist, inventor and entrepreneur. Born on 13 August 1967 in Los Angeles, she began her career after being discovered by cinematographer James Wong Howe and appeared in television commercials before landing her breakthrough role.
She played Lucy McFadden, the precocious daughter of Marsha Mason’s character, in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl (1977). For the performance she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe nomination. She had a recurring role as Annie Cooper on the series Family (1978–1980) and guest appearances in shows including Remington Steele (1984) and Blossom (1991).
Cummings largely retired from acting in the early 1990s. She later invented the HipHugger baby carrier, for which she holds a US patent, and has written humorous memoirs and essay collections, including Notes from the Underwire (2009).
