*For the foreseeable future, some Character Review posts may not be published every Thursday as they have in the past.
*Warning: This post contains spoilers about the characters from the television series The Nanny. Read at your own risk if you have not watched the show. There is something to be said about a well-written, human character. They leap off the page and speak to us as if they were right in front of us, as flesh and blood human beings, instead of fictional creations. Losing a parent at any age is difficult. But the loss is harder when your young and you do not have the language or the emotionally capacity to express your feelings as an adult would.
On the The Nanny, Grace Sheffield (Madeline Zima) is the youngest of widower Maxwell Sheffield‘s (Charles Shaughnessy) three children. Acutely aware that her mother has passed on, Grace has been seeing a therapist to deal with the loss. These weekly sessions have given her an outlook on the world that most children her age don’t have. When her father hires Fran Fine (Fran Drescher) to look after his children, she finds the mother figure that she has been missing. Grace becomes the daughter that Fran has yet to have. They go nearly everywhere together and Grace quickly adopts Fran’s clothing style and way of speaking.
To sum it up: Though the five stages of grief are pretty standard, how we deal with that experience differs from person to person. Grace’s journey is that of a young girl who at first, is unable to process that she is down to a single parent. But when Fran enters her life, she is able to move away from the heartbreak, but still hold onto the memories of her mother.
Which is why she is a memorable character.
Writergurlny 