Thora And The Dad Factor
There has been many a child star where one parent has played a very dominant and dominating role. This happens as we see, not just in movies but in the sports arena as well. Look at the Steffi Grafs, the Maria Sharapovas and the like. Well, when it happens in the movies, it usually slowly grows into a dominating presence. It could just start off as protectiveness for a child star from one or both parents and then grow into a kind of power game or struggle. In many instances, the young stars are very content to let their parents manage the show – it leaves them out of the loop when it comes to the negotiating, the bargaining and the arguing.
One is not entirely sure exactly what kind of a role Thora’s parents play in her career or even indeed in her personal life. However, they have been very much in the forefront ever since Thora made her first appearance in all those commercials, then on TV and then in the movies. In fact, since she was only seventeen when she acted in American Beauty she had to have her parents present, consenting to let her bare her breasts for the movie.
In seems rather unfortunate that the father’s role has extended further to when she was an adult as well. When the film The Winter of Frozen Dreams was being filmed, the father was very much there, not in a protective role but to supervise the sex scenes. The story goes that the middle-aged pimp, played by Dean Winters, gets the girl, Thora to seduce older men and then poison them after having made out everything to her. The film has scenes of Dean Winters and Thora Birch making out and Jack Birch, her father was there to give her a few pointers on how to get it right. The norm for such scenes in Hollywood is that it is shot behind closed doors but he insisted on being there. Did he feel he was in a position to give her the right kind of direction considering that both he and his wife were adult movie stars – and that they actually met on the sets of the famous movie Deep Throat?
This is a true life story of a pimp and a massage parlor girl and the real killer is doing time in prison after having done away with two men. For Jack Birch to interfere in a set when a movie as serious as this is being filmed, even to the extent of instructing the director how to do the lighting so Thora looked her best was in rather bad taste. It all meant that the scene just had to have so many retakes – something no actor really enjoys. When they tried to keep him away from the sets, he threatened to pull Thora out of the movie, just a few days before the whole thing was supposed to be canned. Well, the movie was completed but it will be a long time before the bad taste leaves everyone’s mouth.