Elisabeth Harnois
Elisabeth Harnois is an actor, born 1979.
Elisabeth Harnois was working before she started school. She is in One Magic Christmas in 1985 as Abbie Grainger, voiced Zoe in the cartoon Fantastic Max, and in 1992 became Alice in Disney's Adventures in Wonderland, a daily series that put a child actress at the centre of every episode for years. Most people who start that young do not still have a career decades later.
She did. The teenage years brought guest and recurring work on Unhappily Ever After, Brotherly Love and The Client, then the Disney Channel film My Date with the President's Daughter. What she is good at is a specific American brightness with something withheld behind it, which is exactly what Pretty Persuasion needed from her in 2005 and what made her useful in the run of small independent films that followed: Ten Inch Hero, Chaos Theory, Keith, Solstice, and a part in Tom Ford's A Single Man.
Television took her back in the end. She joined CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as Morgan Brody in 2011 and stayed until the show finished in 2015, four years inside one of the most-watched procedurals in the world, which is a comfortable place to land. Since then it has mostly been the Christmas-movie circuit, The Christmas Contract among them, plus Ki in the motion-capture film Mars Needs Moms.
Movies (13)
TV (8)
Where to start with Elisabeth Harnois
Four seasons of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as Morgan Brody make up the long stretch, and they are why most visitors land on this page. They are also, honestly, the least interesting of her work: the show was well into its late period and the writing had settled into a groove.
The performance to seek out is Pretty Persuasion, a mean, very funny high-school satire that uses her cheerfulness as a weapon. Pair it with Ten Inch Hero, which is the opposite register and has a devoted following, and Keith, a small teen drama considerably better than its distribution suggested.
For the child work, Adventures in Wonderland is the Disney series she carried and One Magic Christmas is the odd, genuinely bleak family film she made first. A Single Man and Mars Needs Moms are the two curiosities: one immaculate, one a famous commercial failure.