Before They Were Stars: Dakota Fanning on “Ally McBeal”

You might think it would be pretty difficult to do a “Before They Were Stars” feature on Dakota Fanning, but believe it or not, she was already an incredibly busy actor by the time she was five years old and had quite a few credits to her name when she delivered her breakthrough performance in I Am Sam. You can see her here very briefly in this flashback sequence from an episode of Ally McBeal, playing Ally when she was a child. Incidentally, it seems that Dakota was the go-to girl for playing younger versions of female sitcom stars around this time. Here she is in a flashback sequence playing Ellen DeGeneres as a child on this episode of The Ellen Show.