BIOGRAPHY – Danielle Harris

Published on: 15th September, 2009

BIOGRAPHY - Danielle Harris  | read this item

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Most actresses that were dubbed ’scream queens’ were often in their twenties by the time the horror genre had embraced them. Jamie Lee Curtis, Linnea Quigley, Heather Langemkamp – they would all portray high school students who are targeted by an unstoppable bogeyman. Very few children would play a significant role in the genre. With perhaps the exception of Corey Feldman, who had temporarily brought Jason Voorhees to a halt in the mid-eighties, the most successful of these young actors was Danielle Harris, the young star of two Halloween movies, who would eventually return to the franchise almost twenty years later to fight him once again. Having made her first appearance in the genre at the age of ten, Harris quickly became a fan favourite and, after several years of obscurity, is once again a bonafide scream queen.

Born Danielle Andrea Harris on June 1 1977 and was raised in Queens, New York. After appearing in several commercials, she won her first break at the age of eight as Sami Garretson in ABC’s popular daytime soap One Life to Live, followed by an episode of Spencer: For Hire. In 1988, the long dormant Halloween franchise (that had been effectively killed with the critically panned Halloween III: Season of the Witch in 1982) was finally to be resurrected, with original star Donald Pleasence once again returning as Dr. Loomis, the determined and demented adversary of series antagonist Michael Myers. With Halloween’s heroine Jamie Lee Curtis no longer willing to portray the role of Laurie Strode, having since found fame with the likes of Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda, the producers were forced to have to create a new character for the fans.

Their replacement was to be Jamie Lloyd, Laurie’s daughter, who had been adopted by a new family after Laurie had died in a car crash (this would later be revealed as fake in Halloween H20). Michael, who had spent the last decade in a coma, suddenly awakens and, determined to sever his family’s bloodline for good, heads back to Haddonfield to kill his niece, with Loomis once again in pursuit. Harris managed to give a successful audition, although she would receive stiff competition for the role from another young hopeful, Melissa Joan Hart, who would later find fame in the title role of the hit show Sabrina the Teenage Witch (after losing out on Halloween 4, Hart would not act again until 1991 when she would star in Nickelodeon’s hit show Clarissa Explains It All). Her co-stars would be impressed by just how professional and mature the young actress was, who would celebrate her eleventh birthday on set. As a further treat, once Pleasence had completed filming his scenes, he allowed Harris to move into his luxurious trailer, who would be required to work for thirty-six of the forty-one days of shooting. Her Michael Myers co-star George P. Wilbur, would often remove his mask in between takes to reassure Harris that he was only acting, although she was always well aware that it was make believe.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers would prove to be a major success, with fans eager to see their favourite slasher villain again after his absence in the third movie. Impressed by the box office figures, the producers decided to immediately rush a new sequel into production, with both Pleasence and Harris agreeing to return. Whilst Halloween 4 had ended with Michael seemingly dead and Jamie having adopted his evil, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers would see Harris’ character once again the victim, now having gained a psychic connection with her uncle. Harris would once again spend her birthday on set, although there would be some tension between Pleasence and Swiss director Dominique Othenin-Girard (who would lack the easygoing attitude of Halloween 4’s Dwight H. Little).

As with Halloween 4, Harris would leave an impression on both her co-stars and the filmmakers with her intelligence and commitment to her role. One scene in particular which proved especially challenging was the laundry chute sequence, in which Jamie attempts to climb as Michael repeatedly stabs his large knife through the side. Initially, Jamie was to have been stabbed in the leg, with KNB EFX creating a bloody stump to be attached to the actress, but the producers eventually decided that the scene was too bloody and so removed the effect. Harris would keep the prop as a souvenir of her time on set (just as she had done with the clown costume from Halloween 4). Whilst the previous film had been a hit with the fans, Halloween 5 was greeted with a mostly negative response, mainly due to the incoherent storyline and writers’ decision to ignore Jamie’s fate at the end of the fourth movie.

After Halloween 5, Harris began to branch out into other genres, even appearing alongside such stars as Bruce Willis and Steven Seagal. Many of these successful features included Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (a vehicle for Married With Children’s Christina Applegate), City Slickers, Marked for Death and The Last Boy Scout. She would also make regular appearances in various television shows like Eerie, Indiana and Growing Pains, before landing the role of Molly Tilden in the hit sitcom Roseanne. After another success with Free Willy, Harris was approached by the producers of Halloween to once again reprise the role of Jamie, although the treatment of her character (murdered early on in the film, shortly after giving birth), coupled with the producers’ refusal to pay her salary of $5,000 (less than she had been paid in the previous films), resulted in her declining, with the role eventually going to newcomer J.C. Brandy.

In 1996, Harris would co-star alongside another action hero, Sylvester Stallone, in Rob Cohen’s Daylight (which would also include Viggo Mortensen and Dan Hedaya). Other television roles would come with Boy Meets World, E.R. and Diagnosis Murder, before making her return to the horror genre in 1998 with Urban Legend. Unlike her role in Halloween, Harris would portray Tosh Guaneri, an aggressive and death-obsessed goth, who is brutally murdered whilst the heroine is asleep in the next bed. Going against her previous nice-girl image, fans would be shocked by the mean streak of her character, but the movie would become a huge success, with Wes Craven’s Scream having renewed the cinemagoers’ interest in the slasher genre.

Harris would next enjoy a frequent role in the animated series The Wild Thornberrys, before revamping her character Debbie Thornberry for Rugrats Go Wild. With the Halloween franchise dead and gone in the wake of the abysmal performance of Halloween Resurrection in 2002, rock star-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie had been hired by Dimension to direct a remake of John Carpenter’s original classic, which would see the return of both Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, albeit played by different actors. For the role of Annie Brackett, originally portrayed by Nancy Loomis, Zombie eventually settled on Harris, which would see her return to the series after an eighteen-year absence. Following on from his sleazy and sadistic road movie The Devil’s Rejects, fans opinions of his trailer trash take on Myers were mixed, although the news of Harris’ return was unanimously applauded.

One aspect of her performance that would both shock and please fans, however, was the news that the actress, then twenty-nine would bear her breast for the role. She would not be on her own, with co-stars Hanna Hall and Kristina Klebe showing even more. The (supposed) death of Annie would be far more brutal than in Carpenter’s movie, with Harris being repeatedly stabbed by Michael, now portrayed by Tyler Mane. Yet, despite her father discovering her close to death and covered in blood, Zombie decided to resurrect her once again for the recent sequel Halloween II. Ironically, Harris would prove to be more popular with the fans than Scout Taylor-Compton, who would take over from Curtis in the role of Laurie.

Thanks to her appearance in Halloween, Harris’ popularity is higher than ever, with roles in several horror films on the horizon, including Left for Dead and Blood Night, whilst she also makes her directorial debut alongside fellow scream queens Langenkamp and Halloween 4 co-star Ellie Cornell with Prank. Another role of interest is in Fear Clinic, the web series created by FEARnet and starring horror legends Robert ‘Freddy Krueger’ Englund and Kane ‘Jason Voorhees’ Hodder. Over twenty years after her first appearance in Halloween 4 and Harris, now thirty-two, has established herself as one of the most popular actresses in the horror genre, with the promise of more to come.

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