Mischa Barton: The Free Spirit

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/06/29/...e-free-spirit/

I missed the whole Mischa Barton moment. I was aware of her as the star of the hit teen-skewing TV show, The OC, but I was hardly the demographic for that series. I was certainly aware that the kid from The Sixth Sense had become a famous TV star and was constantly on the covers of magazines and tabloids for a while. Until she wasn’t. Today, after retreating from the limelight for a while, Barton is one of the stars of MTV’s reboot of The Hills. This cover story from the Novemeber 2004 issue of Movieline magazine came right around the time Barton’s career was peaking.

NO MATER HOW MUCH SOME MAY want her to, Mischa Barton isn’t about to slip into Shannen Doherty’s old bad-girl stilettos anytime soon, thank you all very much. Since the 18-year-old, British-born stunner burst onto the TV scene last year as The O.C.‘s riotously pretty, turbulent, sometimes chemically dependent high school heartbreaker from one of Southern California’s most posh beach communities, she’s been simultaneously embraced and gobsmacked by the press. But virtually everybody agreed that she’s one of the great tidbits of eye candy on a show redolent of posh, sheen, and flash. Seemingly overnight, her elegant looks (which recall the young Jacqueline Bissett) and poise turned her into a brand-new favorite cover girl, product spokesperson and star-to-watch.

But if people meeting Barton had expected her to be a docile, empty-headed, vacuous bauble, they had another thing coming. An intriguing amalgam of giddy, infectious 14-year-old enthusiasm and impressively centered 40-year-old gravitas, Barton hadn’t come to the business overnight. London-born, the middle daughter of a former foreign exchange broker father and an Irish photographer-homemaker mother, she had been successful in show business for a decade when The O.C. turned her into a household name. As a 9-year-old she was already landing tony off-Broadway roles, on which she capitalized by doing three years on All My Children and snagging small, memorable roles in studio films like the upchucking ghost in The Sixth Sense and the kid actress in Notting Hill.

But once The O.C. aired and became a phenomenon for its I canny brew of soap, self-satire, sex and tsuris, Barton became the show’s poster child–profiled, photographed, lionized by the press as one of young Hollywood’s newest, most exciting citizens and, yes, gossiped about. In a long, grueling photo shoot she could be civilized, patient and uncomplaining. But more importantly, people wanted to know, were she and hunky Benjamin McKenzie more than just costars on the show? Or was that alleged romance merely a press fabrication and was she really dating Phantom Planet band member Alex Greenwald? Was her aplomb in interviews and at social events a sign of enviable maturity or breathtaking snobbery? Most fatally, had head-spinning attention turned her into a party animal and diva of the very first order?

Before The O.C. hit the airwaves, Barton was bracing, funny, merrily sardonic, somewhat naive but nobody’s fool. So now the question: Has success spoiled Mischa Barton?