A wealthy family is thrown into turmoil when Caroline (Stephanie Zimbalist), a daughter who has been presumed dead for 15 years, suddenly appears to reclaim her inheritance. As the family struggles with their doubts about this stranger, Caroline also learns a secret about her father's new wife and children. An intriguing mystery ... a touching drama, Caroline depicts the power and durability of love in the face of suspicion and deception.
An Emmy winner for Best Drama. 1990
Cast
Stephanie Zimbalist .... Caroline
Pamela Reed .... Grace
George Grizzard .... Paul
Patricia Neal .... Headmistress
Dorothy McGuire .... Caroline's Grandmother
Shawn Phelan .... Winston
Jenny Jacobs .... Heidi
Libby Whittemore .... Bunny
John Evans (II) .... Winston as Adult
Barbara Britt .... Hilary
John Bennes .... Simmons
Judith Sullivan .... Agnes
Mary Nell Santacroce .... Aunt Helen
Dan Albright .... Mr. Phillips
Warde Q. Butler .... Randolph
The Los Angeles Times, April-28-1990b
y Howard Rosenberg
Caroline? Hallmark Hall of Fame
Caroline? is a swell little mystery and human-interest.
The setting is Atlanta in the 1950s, where the structured existence of the wealthy Carmichael family is jolted by the sudden appearance of a woman (Stephanie Zimbalist) claiming to be the daughter of Paul Carmichael (George Grizzard) from a previous marriage. The problem is that Caroline was thought to have perished in a plane crash 15 years earlier.
The woman looks like Caroline and knows enough about her to convince Paul and others. But is she really Caroline or, as Paul's skeptical present wife, Grace (Pamela Reed), believes, is she a fortune-hunting imposter?
Director Joseph Sargent shapes this "Hallmark Hall of Fame" drama suspensefully. But what equally drives Michael de Guzman's story (based on a novel by E. L. Konigsburg - ) is the tenderness between Caroline and the two Carmichael children, 12-year-old Winston (Shawn Phelan) and Heidi (Jenny Jacobs), a physically impaired, disruptive 10-year-old whose emotional development has been gnarled by her mother's pampering and sheltering.
Although the two children battle each other, their relationship is also deeply moving. This human element and the mystery are smoothly merged, and except for its soft ending, "Caroline?" is an interesting, complex, emotional story.
The excellent performances don't hurt.
Zimbalist is persuasive in a catalytic role that sparks enigma while revealing that the true dysfunctional here is less Heidi than the Carmichael family as a unit. Yet it's the fine work of Phelan as the sensitive and introspective Winston, and Reed as the smothering, defensive, narrow-thinking Grace that you remember most. The even bigger star of this Barry & Enright production, though, may be independent casting director Shari Rhodes. It was Rhodes who, with the blessings of Sargent and producer Dorothea G. Petrie, sought only children with disabilities to audition as Heidi. And it was Rhodes who, after a four-city search, hired 1982 Cerebral Palsy Poster Child Jenny Jacobs in Chicago.
Jacobs, 13, does nicely in her first professional acting job,demonstrating that it made good sense creatively to hire someone whosedisability paralleled Heidi's. "If I hadn't have done that, I couldn't have lived with myself," Rhodes said recently. Not to do it, she added, would have "violated the trust of the piece."
Viewers should note also that the actress playing the adult Heidi walks with a limp that appears genuine. It's Barbara Britt's legacy from childhood polio.
Rhodes very easily could have cast an able-bodied actress with a fake limp for this tiny role, but instead chose Britt, whom she met while teaching an acting class in Dallas, where the actress lives. Although it seems like only a small thing that Rhodes did, it's a big thing in Hollywood, where narrow-mindedness, not their own bodies, is the foe of actors with disabilities.
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