Young Idgie from ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ is all grown up
Before Nancy Atchison auditioned for the part of the young Idgie Threadgoode in the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes,” her parents read her the novel on which it was based, Fannie Flagg’s “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.” Though she was only 10 years old at the time, Nancy immediately identified with Idgie’s character.
“I am Idgie,” she remembers thinking. “That’s me.”
Her parents also thought she was right for the part. “My family is full of strong, outspoken, spunky women,” she says. “That’s the reason it was such a good fit.”
Now married to her high school sweetheart, Bradley Hendrix, and living in Homewood, Alabama, with their 12-year-old son, Noah, “the light of our lives,” Nancy Hendrix works as the director of development at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
She doesn’t often talk about the fact that she spent years working as a child actor. “There are several people I’ve known for a decade or longer who don’t know I’ve been in movies,” she says.
Still, “Fried Green Tomatoes” holds a special place in her heart “not because it’s such a famous film, but because of the legacy it’s created,” she says. At 10, she couldn’t have understood that she would be “part of something that will live forever and make people think,” she says. “The film is insightful in so many ways.”
Young Idgie has grown up
Alabama native Nancy Atchison, now Nancy Hendrix, charmed film audiences in the 1991 movie “Fried Green Tomatoes.” (Photos courtesy Nancy Hendrix)
Released in 1991, the movie focuses on two sets of female friendships in two time periods. In the present day, Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), an 82-year-old nursing home resident, shares colorful tales from her hometown of Whistle Stop, Alabama, with her new friend Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates). The story-within-a story unfolds through Ninny’s tales of the grown-up Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker), starting in the 1920s.
Nancy brings young Idgie to life in the first 17 minutes of the movie, establishing her as a spirited and headstrong child. In her first scene, she’s stubbornly refusing to come downstairs on the day of her sister’s wedding. Her unkempt blonde pageboy haircut is topped with an unlikely blue ribbon as big as her head. As she descends the stairs at her mother’s insistence, she lifts her lace skirt to reveal the skinned knees of a girl more comfortable barefooted and running in the woods.
After she jumps over the stair rail to attack her brother Julian when he makes fun of her, she runs out the front door of the picturesque farmhouse and climbs a tree, throwing her entire ensemble, including her shoes, onto the lawn. Her beloved older brother, Buddy (Chris O’Donnell), climbs up after her and consoles her. The next thing we know, Idgie is sitting between him and her mama at the ceremony, wearing a linen suit and impishly reflecting light from a little mirror into the preacher’s face.
During the reception, Idgie walks along the dam with Buddy and his love interest, Ruth. When the wind blows her hat down onto the railroad tracks, she and Ruth laugh as they watch him chase it – until his foot gets stuck. Their joy turns to horror as a train approaches and Buddy struggles to unlace his shoe. As he’s about to be struck by the train, Idgie screams, “Buddy!”
No matter how many times you watch the movie, it’s impossible not to feel shock that Idgie’s sweet, understanding protector has died right before her eyes. One of Nancy’s close friends has told her she can’t watch that part of the movie because it feels like she’s grieving, too.
‘It all snowballed’
Nancy Atchison was in first grade in her neighborhood school in Montgomery – in the very first desk on the first row in a classroom seated in alphabetical order – when the principal came in with a young woman visitor. They walked up and down the rows, finally stopping by her desk and asking her to step out into the hallway.
Six-year-old Nancy burst into tears. “I thought I was in trouble,” she remembers.
The principal calmed her down and explained that the woman was a casting agent for a movie. She gave Nancy an index card with instructions for her parents to bring her to the Governor’s House Hotel over the weekend.
Nancy’s parents thought it was strange, but at the last minute curiosity won them over and her dad decided to take her to the audition. The movie turned out to be “The Long Walk Home,” about the Montgomery bus boycott, starring Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg.
