Reese Witherspoon is a woman, aged thirty-five, with a bundle of grownup roles behind her.
We saw those contradictions in the work of Parker, Crudup, and Hawke, former rising stars who have attained iconic status, and who are currently playing grownup roles in a number of this season's high-profile productions.
By the end of the decade, though, she was adopting a graver persona as Queen Amidala in the three Star Wars prequels, which despite their limited potential for actual acting, performed as a kind of gateway to more grownup roles.
And as anyone who has made the transition from needy teen to independent grownup knows, your role as a daughter changes right along with you during those formative years.
In Anderson's films, the idea that grownups can be role models to children is rendered absurd.
Mr. Lofton, an amateur umpire, has for 19 years performed a crucial if largely unheralded role: the grownup who makes sure the boys and girls of summer play by the rules — as he chooses to interpret them.
And we, as grownups, parents, teachers and role models, can't be afraid to talk about it, either.
Two months later came the far more grownup challenge of the ballerina role in Frederick Ashton's Rhapsody.
During the primaries, Biden often played the role of policy grownup, the candidate who liked to chide the unrealistic plans of his rivals.
Rather than offering thrill rides, like Disney World, or video-game arcades, like Chuck E. Cheese's, KidZania gives children between the ages of four and fourteen the chance to enact the roles of grownups in a lavishly realized, scaled-down world.
