Not Exactly Like Mom

Debbie Reynolds was the madcap of the '50s, a slip of a colleen with a heart-shaped face. Her daughter Carrie Fisher, 18, is the madcap of the '70s, a dourly funny sophisticate. Debbie's big hit movie was the innocuous Tammy and the Bachelor, in which she played a professional teen-age virgin. Carrie has a hit flick too: Warren Beatty's Beverly Hills satire Shampoo. She also played a teen-ager--a nymphet who traps Beatty into bed.

Ironically, it is Carrie who looks like the old-fashioned girl. Her round face and soft brown eyes have a grave gentleness that might have prompted Beatrix Potter to call her "sweetly pretty." But Carrie has a mischievous grin, sharper, more biting than Debbie's ever was, and her demeanor is world-weary. A show business kid, Carrie knows all the steps but cannot quite catch life's tune. "Emotionally, I'm crippled," she likes to explain. "I have to catch up on myself."

Just at the moment, it is easier to work on her career; this year she is studying at a London drama school bridging what she hopes is only a transitional hiatus in her career. "I'm too old to play little whores and teen-age rape victims," she says. The trouble is, Carrie knows that women's roles in Hollywood are still stereotyped and their range is sadly limited. "Women," she says, "no longer just get sown while men do all the sowing." Carrie's acidulous commentaries make social life difficult. "It's hard to get turned on by a man the same age. Boys always used to be intimidated because I could use the word ostensibly." Beatty, however, has chosen Carrie to help him promote Shampoo this summer.

Identity problems also plague Patricia Neal's daughter Tessa Dahl, 18. When Tessa decided to act, Bette Davis told her, "If you do a nude scene, I shall never speak to you again." Tessa does not want to do a nude scene, but she would do almost anything for a break. She promises to be her mother's double: tall and graceful with the same wide face and wide-spaced eyes; she has the same seductive smile. The only thing missing is what Critic Kenneth Tynan called Pat Neal's "dark brown voice." Her father Roald Dahl, the British writer, confirms another similarity: "She's a worldly, ambitious girl, just like her mother."

So far, Tessa's ambitions have been frustrated. She appeared with her mother in Happy Mother's Day . . . Love, George in 1973, but the movie flopped. Recently John Houston saw her and flipped; she was offered the only female role in his movie The Man Who Would Be King on condition she slimmed down by 20 lbs. and had her eyeteeth capped. She dieted so enthusiastically she became ill, only to learn the part had gone to the wife of Michael Caine, the film's star. "I cried all night."

Tessa is the Dahls' eldest daughter since her sister Olivia died of encephalitis in 1962, and there is something wistful in her striving to be a star. She really believes "a woman's place is in the home and an acting career is not good for marriage," but she is not ready to settle down. Her parents are encouraging her independence. They recently bought a London apartment for her. But she does not want it known too quickly that she has stopped housekeeping for her boy friend, the Hon. Patrick Fisher, a rich young man about town. Show business, she knows only too well, is a lot of hype--and giving up such a trendy arrangement might kill her publicity.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.