From Freaky Friday to Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan has plenty of great movies on her celebrity CV. However, arguably her most beloved is the modern 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. In this film, the former child star played identical twins Annie James and Hallie Parker, who meet at summer camp after being separated at birth, and they scheme to get their parents (Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson) back together and reunite the family. Now, the actress’s father has explained why he thinks she deserved an Oscar nomination for her role, and you know what, I’m totally with him.
It’s a pair of tricky parts for the then 11-year-old actress, especially as Lohan had to seamlessly portray both Cali-girl Hallie and her Britain-bred sister Annie, often in the same scene, thanks to a little movie magic. But Linds pulls it all off with great aplomb, in what was stunningly her first-ever film job. (Yes, that was more than 25 years ago and we’ve been feeling all of the nostalgia ever since.)
And yet, the actress wasn’t recognized by any of the big awards’ bodies for her plucky, acclaimed performance, including the Oscars, a slight that her father—and yours truly—are still miffed about. Lindsay’s dad Michael Lohan revealed on the most recent episode of Behind the Velvet Rope his reaction to watching his famous daughter’s The Parent Trap performances:
I literally cried. I couldn’t believe my daughter was so talented, to switch her accents at the drop of a dime, on her own, and pull that off like she did.
He also praised Lindsay for weathering “seven months of shooting” as the lead of the Nancy Meyers-directed film, which also starred Abbott Elementary‘s Lisa Ann Walters (who, yes, wants LiLo to come guest on the ABC school sitcom) as Hallie’s housekeeper/nanny/butler Chessy and Elaine Hendrix as the delightfully evil stepmom-to-be Meredith Blake.
Michael said of Lohan’s English accent, which the young star had to employ opposite the movie’s real-life Brits like Natasha Richardson, Simon Kunz and Ronnie Stevens:
It’s seamless. It’s flawless, and she should have gotten an Oscar for that film. There’s no question. You show me another kid that age that could have pulled that off. I don’t know any.
However, during the podcast appearance, Lohan’s dad did name-drop another young icon to whom he likened Lindsay’s early talents: Judy Garland.
Garland received the now-defunct Academy Juvenile Award in 1940 for her work in both The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms. The Juvenile Award was basically an Oscar specially designated to honor child performers under the age of 18, but it was last awarded in 1961, decades before Lindsay turned in her own award-worthy performance in The Parent Trap.
Though Lohan took a bit of a break from film acting in the 2010s, she’s made a resurgence in the last few years. This happened via her Netflix movies like 2022’s goofy Falling for Christmas, the upcoming Ireland-set rom-com Irish Wish (hitting the 2024 movie schedule on March 15), and the holiday flick Our Little Secret opposite Kristin Chenoweth and her Mean Girls co-star Tim Meadows.
But if you want to revisit old-school LiLo as Annie and Hallie in The Parent Trap, you can watch the 1998 fan favorite with a Disney+ subscription.
