Friday, September 7, 2007

Out in Film: Heather Matarazzo

"We were sitting in my pink room with pink carpeting. It was summer and we were sitting Indian-style across from each other, and I was so incredibly nervous. And I thought, "Yeah, I am definitely gay."

-- Heather Matarazzo, describing her first kiss with a girl.

One of the most auspicious film debuts in recent memory was that of the then eleven-year-old Heather Matarazzo as the outcast nerdette Dawn Wiener in Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse. Since that film, Matarazzo has brought to the screen many memorably quirky characters, but she will always be remembered, for better or worse, as the "Wienerdog".

Splitting her time between movies and television, Matarazzo has co-starred on the short-lived series Townies and Now and Again and guest-starred on Roseanne and The L Word. On film, she gave a stand-out performance in The Devil's Advocate, and also appeared in 54, Scream 3, Sorority Boys and re-teamed with Solondz for his Storytelling, although her scenes were eventually cut (subsequently, she declined his offer to reprise her Dollhouse role in his Palindromes).

Matarazzo gained mainstream fame as Anne Hathaway's BFF in The Princess Diaries and its sequel, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. She then starred with her Diaries co-star Mandy Moore in the religious satire Saved! and her Roseanne co-star John Goodman in the college comedy Freshman Orientation (just now making its way into theaters).

Recently, Matarazzo starred in Eli Roth's gory Hostel: Part II and has appeared in several gay-centric documentaries, such as Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema, providing a younger gay person's point of view.

Links via Imbd.com and InsideSoCal.com.

2 comments:

Liiiisssssaaaaa said...

I absolutely love her, always have. She'll never win first place in my heart over Christina Ricci, however.

Anonymous said...

I like Heather I think she should be a really big actor and I think she's pretty.