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aunt was a sideline reporter in football. Although Elle has
always had physical interests—she did ballet for a while, be-
fore subjecting herself to a brief but intense preoccupation
with hot yoga—the sisters’ interests quickly turned in other
directions. When Dakota was five, she went to a local theater
camp and was spotted by a scout. “It was a play called Blue
Fish. She was the blue fish!” Elle explains. “They’re like, You
need to go to L.A. or New York with her, because she was
amazing at being the blue fish.” In an act of parental heroism,
their mother put her life in Georgia on hold and relocated
to California with Dakota for commercials and pilot season;
Elle and her father followed when Dakota booked a lead in
the Sean Penn drama I Am Sam. Elle was called on set to
play that character’s younger self. By the time she was six,
they were giving interviews together.
Today, Elle talks about Dakota with open awe and
something more. “You think, Gosh, if I didn’t have a sister
who started acting, would I be acting?” she says. A peek at
home videos of the toddler Elle reveals a natural performer.
(“Here’s . . . Elle Fanning!” she cries into the camera, spread-
ing her arms wide.) But her path was cleared by Dakota,
and a mutual loyalty has lingered as their work has diverged.
“People sometimes want us to feel weird jealousy or competi-
tion,” Dakota says. “It will never happen. There’s no one I
want to see succeed or soar more.”
Elle loathes auditions—she once fainted in one from
sheer terror—but she loves to meet with directors and talk
a project over. When Coppola cast Somewhere, the two
immediately hit it off. “She just had a really fun, sparkling
personality,” Coppola says. “It’s that rare combination of
being sophisticated but a kid at the same time—she’s not a
mini-adult like a lot of kid actors.” Because the character in
Somewhere skates, Coppola offered Fanning an ice-skating
double, but Fanning knew the skating scene was key, so for
weeks she took early-morning and after-school lessons.
Somewhere showed the world she was more than just Da-
kota Fanning’s sister. But that was already quite long ago.
“All of a sudden, she’s much taller than me,” Coppola says.
“But the same person, with the same sparkly essence.”
Marilyn Monroe has been Fanning’s hero for about fifteen
years—most of her life. She studies Marilyn’s interviews the
way some study paintings by Cézanne. “You could always see
the emotions that she was feeling . . . in her eyes,” she says.
“She didn’t know how great she was.”
She often wonders how Marilyn would have managed
social media. For years, Fanning resisted what she calls (in
excellent old-lady fashion) “the Facebook and the Twitter.”
But as time went on she worried she was too much in her
shell. “I need to evolve with the times!” she says. She’s a visual
person, so Instagram beckoned. As of this writing, her ac-
count has upward of 900,000 followers. “Before you share,
you get nervous: You can’t help but have those flashes,” she
says. “My sister has a million followers—which is nothing
compared with Selena Gomez, who has the world.”
Yet Fanning’s embrace of technology is still vexed at best.
She got Netflix for the first time this past winter. She does
not have any of the new emojis on her iPhone, because she
has not managed to update it in a while. As a result, much
of what her friends text her shows up as question marks and
gibberish. She’s too chagrined to tell them, so she acts as if
she understands.
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