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Dakota Fanning has joked her parents would “disown” her if she didn’t like sports.
The 23-year-old’s mother Heather used to play professional tennis, while her dad Steven took part in minor league baseball games.
She and her younger sister, fellow actress Elle, pursued a showbiz path though; with Very Good Girls star Dakota admitting she doesn’t have the skills to follow in her parents’ footsteps.
“I would be disowned if I said I didn’t like sport,” she laughed to Britain’s Marie Claire. “My mom would be like, ‘How could you say something like that?!’ It’s true, I do like it, I just can’t play because I don’t have the drive or passion to be a professional athlete. Or the talent... let’s be honest.”
Dakota, who made a name for herself in films like I Am Sam, Uptown Girls and Hide and Seek in the 2000s, was encouraged by her drama teacher to get an agent and land local jobs like commercials.
It was when Heather took her daughter to auditions in Los Angeles that she realised an acting career was for her, leading father Steve, sibling Elle and the sisters’ grandmother to move out to Tinseltown too.
“Seeing my mom be a stay-at-home mom, I saw the strength in that; in choosing to dedicate her life to being the best mom,” Dakota said. “I remember promoting The Runaways, and being asked, ‘Have you ever been told you couldn’t do something because you were a girl?’ And I was like, ‘No, I haven’t’, and I realised that in growing up with very strong women, I (always had) the feeling there was nothing I couldn’t do.”
As for her relationship with 19-year-old Elle, whose credits include We Bought a Zoo and 20th Century Women, Dakota laughed, “She thinks I’m turning into our mom, which I guess is inevitable for everybody, I don’t know.”