On the page, the character of Harriet Welsch, the inquisitive and sharply judgmental preteen at the center of Louise Fitzhugh’s novel “Harriet the Spy,” is a little tough to take; her habit of writing down mean observations about her classmates is, rightly, seen by her peers as rather harsh. It works — Harriet learns valuable lessons about tact, and grows a great deal — but the role would seem like a tricky assignment.
Michelle Trachtenberg made it look easy. A preternaturally gifted child performer, Trachtenberg starred in the 1996 film adaptation of Fitzhugh’s book. And her Harriet, like so many other characters she would go on to play, was endearing and lovable. Her habit of “spying” on her peers became legible, through Trachtenberg’s performance, as the outlet for a fast-moving creative mind.
Trachtenberg’s untimely death, at 39, marks a passage for millennials — she was one of the signature young stars with whom this generation grew up. On the cult-favorite Nickelodeon show “The Adventure of Pete & Pete,” she provided deadpan ballast to the show’s surrealist trappings. She allowed a way into the proceedings on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for young viewers, playing Buffy’s little sister Dawn, one of the show’s emotional fulcrums. Later, on “Gossip Girl,” Trachtenberg’s Georgina Sparks was a gleeful agent of chaos — taking the fast-ticking mind and the acuity with a sharp insult that the actress had exhibited in “Harriet the Spy” and flipping it on its head.
As someone not far removed from Trachtenberg’s own age, I remember her rise very clearly; a behind-the-scenes video that aired frequently on Nickelodeon, which produced “Harriet the Spy,” lodged itself into my skull. The reason why, beyond sheer repetition, was that Trachtenberg, then, just seemed like a kid, not a pro; she was unaffected, like someone I might have gone to school with, even in spite of the extraordinary circumstance in which she found herself. Another way of saying this is that she was a natural.
Though she worked infrequently and in lower-wattage projects in recent years, Trachtenberg, to her age cohort, is immediately identifiable with multiple moments. She stands in for a time, in the 1990s, when Nickelodeon trusted the sophistication of its young audience to be able to handle the quirk of “Pete & Pete” or the edge of “Harriet the Spy.” Later, too, she was a star of a particular late moment in broadcast TV when a gifted actor could help anchor ambitious genre fare, be it fantasy or soap. Her loss is a painful one in light of just how much promise seemed to lie ahead, when she was a little girl scrawling in a notebook.
