Dakota Fanning: ‘I Was An Exceptionally Mature Child’

Dakota Fanning has opened up about her years as a young actor, admitting that it was no surprise that she entered the trade at her age because she was “an exceptionally mature child.”

Speaking to Town & Country, Fanning, who began her career when she was just 5-years-old, noted, “It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t know me as a child. But even before I started working — when I was two, three, four, five — I was an exceptionally mature child.”

“I just was,” she added. “And my mom and I were able to have conversations like, ‘Do you want to go to California and go to auditions for commercials and TV shows? Is that something you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s give it a try.'”

Fanning, alongside her mother, Heather Joy, father, Steven, and younger sister, Elle, who is now a recognised actress in her own right, decided to move from Woodstock, Georgia, to Los Angeles when she was just 5 years old in order to become a child actor.

Some of her first roles were in ER, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Practice, Spin City, Ally McBeal, and The Ellen Show. However, she shot to prominence after starring opposite Sean Penn in I Am Sam. Because of her turn in this movie she became the youngest ever person to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award — something she garnered at the tender age of 7.

Fanning’s stock continued to rise as she appeared in alongside Denzel Washington in Tony Scott’s 2004 action masterpiece Man on Fire and then opposite Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster War of the Worlds.

However, despite the fact that she has been apart of the Hollywood elite for close to 15 years now, Fanning has managed to keep her personal life out of the tabloids.

“I’m just never going to parade my personal life,” she explained during the aforementioned interview. “If you choose to not do it, it’s not hard to not do it… any part of an artistic business is made better by there being a little mystery. That’s what movies are about.”

Fanning doesn’t use either Twitter or Facebook, and she’s even managed to keep her year-long relationship with 32-year-old model Jamie Strachan out of the public consciousness because of this attitude.

Fanning is next set to be seen of the big screen opposite Kevin Kline in The Last of Robin Hood, which is set to be released this fall.

[Image via Bing.com]