This might be considered premature. And it’s kind of embarrassing to admit how much of her work that I love comes from before I’m old enough to remember it new; actually, one of her greatest years is the year I was born, when she made five movies, at least one of which is great and some of the others of which are at least pretty good. (I haven’t seen one of them.) And while she’s still working, I honestly don’t feel as though much of what she’s doing is of note. I hope she’ll surprise us, but since she seems semi-retired, I’m not counting on it.

When I was a kid, the Disney Channel used to play certain movies on heavy rotation; I don’t know how often I’ve seen The Absent-Minded Professor or Pollyanna or, Heaven help us, Dumbo. However, there were a few that were shown less frequently, ones my sisters and I watched out for and would actually schedule around. While we were fond of Freaky Friday, the movie we really went out of our way for was Candleshoe. It later became one of the first movies I ever owned on DVD. If you haven’t seen it, you should.

I’ve long said that, in my opinion, there needs to be a class teaching people how to stop being a child star gracefully. Oh, not everyone can go to Yale. Nor should they. Still. And, yes, one of those roles from the year I was born was a child prostitute, so I’m thinking she had some awareness of how badly things could go for a girl. Even if she didn’t really know it first-hand. And I guess when you play Iris in the same year you play Annabel Andrews, typecasting is not a huge problem for you, though she was approached to play the role in Pretty Baby that eventually went to Brooke Shields.

But she is, now, an Oscar-winning actress. She didn’t go completely off the rails; she made adult movies, and she got a BA. (Side note, I’m a little irritated that “adult movies” has the specific connotation it does.) She sees Silence of the Lambs as the counter to Taxi Driver; instead of needing to be rescued, Clarice rescues others. I would imagine she exorcised more than a few personal demons with that one.

I read once that she still has the lion-bite scars on her stomach from filming Napoleon and Samantha. I can’t help wondering if her reticence on the issue of her sexuality is in part leftover from her time with Disney as well; we’ve talked in this space about what Walt himself did to Tommy Kirk on that subject. Of course, there’s also the fact that she has pretty much never not been in the public eye, going back to when she was three and starred in a Coppertone ad. If I were her, I’d probably want to keep something to myself, too.