Angela Goethals
Angela Goethals started on stage, and the stage kept handing her the better parts. She made her acting debut as a child in the 1987 Broadway production of Coastal Disturbances, and at fourteen she won an Obie for Distinguished Performance by an Actress, playing Edna Arkins in the 1991 Off-Broadway staging of The Good Times Are Killing Me.
That award arrived the year after the credit everyone knows: Linnie in Home Alone (1990), sister to Macaulay Culkin's character, part of the family that flies to Paris without him. Two more early leads followed, Kat Grafalk in V.I. Warshawski (1991) and the short-lived sitcom Phenom (1993).
Then she became a very good small-part actor, which is a different job entirely. Kathy Sanders in Jerry Maguire (1996), Elli in Storytelling (2001), Sarah Windsor in Changing Lanes (2002), Gwen in Spanglish (2004): four films by four directors with loud voices, four parts that exist to make a scene work. The one with an afterlife is Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), a mock documentary horror film that has kept a devoted audience.
Our screen records thin out after that. For an actor who had an Obie before she could legally drive, the film career reads as an interruption rather than the main event.
Movies (9)
TV (4)
Where to start with Angela Goethals
Everyone arrives here through Home Alone, where Linnie is a perfectly judged piece of family cruelty delivered in a handful of lines. It is not a performance you can assess, but it is the reason you came.
The real introduction is Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, the horror mockumentary where she plays Taylor Gentry. It is the only lead-sized role in this catalog and the film has aged into a cult item.
After that, Storytelling is the uncomfortable one and the best-directed, Changing Lanes the most conventional adult drama, and Jerry Maguire and Spanglish are both blink-and-miss. Phenom and V.I. Warshawski are for people tracing the child-actor years properly.