Jeafl said:
Wow! LOTS of people have PM'd me asking if the hockey dad is Andrew Shue!
Alas, it is not. It is her brother Bill who is not nearly as cute (don't tell him I said that!). I think she has another brother and maybe a sister as well. I've met Elisabeth's mother, but I've never met her or Andrew. It would be great if they would come to a game sometime! I do know that Elisabeth has a son named Miles who was there once with the grandma. I had no idea that he was Elisabeth's son though at the time I saw him.
OK this is bizarre I've read this story on numerous sites about Shue's family. According to this her brother Bill died in a tragic accident? Her son was named after him. Who can figure this one out??
Elisabeth Shue comes from a blue-blood Ivy League family that traces its genealogy back to the Mayflower.
In sixth grade, frustrated that there were no girls' soccer teams, she tried out and won a spot on the boys' team, and played against boys for three years. When her high school wouldn't add a girls' soccer team, she took up gymnastics, and became captain of the team.
She also pursued other extracurricular activities. "Oh God," she says, "I smoked a lot of pot. It was the late '70s, early '80s, and the drug culture had died down, so I wasn't doing hard drugs."
"I would cut school and drive my stepfather's rented car illegally, before I had my license. I'd take it down to the shore with my friends and return it and put the keys back and everything was cool. I got pulled over a few times. It was the time when I started to see that looking relatively innocent was a way to get out of trouble. If you smiled at a cop and said, 'I'm really sorry, officer, I forgot my license,' he'd say, 'O.K., I believe you.'
Shue started acting professionally when she was a student at Wellesley College, with commercials for Hellmann's Mayonnaise and Burger King. With a beautiful baby-face that allowed her to play girls much younger than her age, she was perfect for teen roles without needing any of oversight required for child actors.
At 21 playing 16, she played Ralph Macchio's romantic interest in the original Karate Kid movie. The next year she co-starred in Call to Glory, a TV series about a military family in the early 1960s, with Craig T. Nelson as her dad. At 25, she was still believable as a harried high school girl in Chris Columbus's enjoyable farce Adventures in Babysitting.
She finally grew up in Cocktail with Tom Cruise, about which Shue famously commented, "If I'd known that it was just going to be about these guys throwing drinks around then I might have had some second thoughts." She then went back to high school as Michael J. Fox's girlfriend in two sequels to Back to the Future (a different actress had played the part in the original).
Since her extended high school days, her best films include the soap opera comedy Soapdish, the guardian angel sing-a-long Heart and Souls, and Hide and Seek with Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning. She was Oscar-nominated in 1995, for the overrated sex and suicide ride Leaving Las Vegas with Nicolas Cage. Her worst performance is probably Molly, as an institutionalized autistic who undergoes brain surgery.
Between movies, Shue earned her BA in Political Science from Harvard in 2000.
She has politely but emphatically complained that most Hollywood movies give actresses nothing to do beyond gazing into the leading actor's eyes and playing "his girlfriend," "his wife," "his mother," etc.
On a 1988 outing with her family, celebrating her brother William's 27th birthday and the start of his medical residency, he was swinging on an old rope tied to a tree, intending to splash into a pond. But the rope broke, dropping William onto a broken tree branch instead. It impaled him through the gut, and he died as Shue and her other brothers watched helplessly.
Her brother Andrew achieved fame as an actor on Melrose Place and played professional soccer.
Another brother, John, was captain of the Harvard soccer team, and is attempting to produce a film based on Elisabeth's schoolgirl days, centered on her skill as a soccer player. Her husband, TV director Davis Guggenheim, is tentatively slated to direct.
Her father-in-law, Charles Guggenheim, was a documentary filmmaker. He was Oscar-nominated 11 times, and won four.
Father: James Shue (real-estate developer, former public defender)
Mother: Anne Wells Shue (bank executive)
Brother: William Shue (medical student, d. 1988, impaled on a tree)
Brother: Andrew Shue (actor, soccer player)
Brother: John Shue (acquisition investor, co-owner of Mongoose Media)
Boyfriend: Val Kilmer (actor)
Husband: Davis Guggenheim (TV director, The Shield; b. 1964, m. 1994, sep. 1996, reconciled)
Son: Miles William Guggenheim (b. 11-Nov-1997)
Daughter: Stella Street Guggenheim (b. 19-Mar-2001)
High School: Columbia High School, Maplewood, NJ
University: Wellesley College
University: BA Political Science, Harvard University (2000)
