Elle Fanning: Rising Star In Hollywood, Normal Kid at Home

In an era when showbiz families relentlessly push new-model Lohans and Kardashians off an assembly line as ready-made celebrities, Elle Fanning is a breath of fresh air.

Dakota Fanning’s 12-year-old sister, who stars in Sofia Coppola’s new film “Somewhere,” proves not only as poised and natural on screen as her famous sib, she shares that same irresistible regular-kid-ness, as PopcornBiz discovered:

Elle and Dakota bump heads like any set of sisters: “We definitely do get in arguments. I guess every sister does. She hates me when I wear her clothes. That’s the worst thing ever!

"I wore her army green skinny jeans and they were in my room, and that was awful. She grabbed them and was like ‘This is horrible! I have to wash them because you wore them!’”

Elle can get back into her sister’s good graces by whipping together her specialty dish, a skill she learned to do in “Somewhere.”

“I make a really good macaroni and cheese. It was after I made it in that scene that I went home and tried to create my own, so now my sister’s like ‘Can you make that for me?’ So I always make that with loads of heavy cream and cheddar cheese.”

She loves going to a normal middle school: “I was home schooled up until third grade, and then once my sister went to high school in ninth grade, I went to fourth grade. I just started seventh grade. It’s fun to be normal and go to regular school. That’s something that my parents and me and my sister really wanted."

With the holidays in full swing, more family bonding is underway, she said.

“Every year it’s a tradition where I give each of my family members an ornament, so we have a separate tree with all the ornaments that I’ve given my family," she said. "I got my sister a Buddha one year, because she went to Hong Kong and there’s a lot of Buddhas there and she took pictures next to them, and then she had ‘The Runaways,’ so I got her a rock star with a microphone."

Contact Us