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and excitement. “I found myself wondering again and again, <What have I gotten into?’ My training, my strength was in acting. ”
She had the story, a haunting, compelling tale of a little girl’s struggle to understand the disappearance and death of parents she hardly knew.
A chartered twin-engine plane carrying only Stephen and Audry Currier and their pilot was last heard from 30 minutes into a 70-mile trip from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands on Jan. 17, 1967. No trace of the plane or its occupants was ever found.
Mr. and Mrs. Currier were the wealthy philanthrops, very involved in social issues, including civil rights, race relations, mental health, youth unemployment and urban sociology. From 1958 to 1967, they gave their Taconic Foundation more than $8 million to help .govle some of those social problems.
The sudden loss of loving, intelligent parents, who left behind three young children, gave Miss Currier her story. Now she needed a cast.
In looking for a young actress to play the lead character, Miss Currier interviewed scores of New York’s worldly wise 11-year-old pros. “Their mothers were always hovering behind the door, hissing ‘Say this! Say that!’ It was terrible — and tragic. They were so sophisticated. They weren’t children any more.”
Again, she came home to the Virginia countryside. And there she found Morgan Watts at Coleman Elementary School near Marshall.
“I asked Mr. (Robert) Sinclair, the principal at Coleman, if I could sit in on classes. He sent me into the fifth and sixth grade and the first girl I set eyes on was Morgan,” Miss Currier recalled. She interviewed several others, but came back to Morgan each time. “She was the best, even though she’d never acted before, not even in a school play.”
When the casting was over, she had a mix of professionals and firsttimers. For bit parts, she chose familiar faces from the family farm near The Plains. Morgan’s brother in the film is played by Freddie Koehler, the little red head on TV’s Kate and Allie.
Joe Seneca, who starred in The Verdict and Silverado, is Nimrod, the old stable groom who assumes
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