For the Shues, 'Gracie' Is One From the Family Heart

It's always complicated, being part of a family. Even more so when you're the only girl in a family of four kids. And when the oldest brother, the golden child, dies tragically young. And when, almost 20 years later, your other brother says he wants to make a movie about that loss and he wants you to be in it and wants your famous husband to direct.

But she's pretty sure she did the right thing, Elisabeth Shue.

Little girls keep showing up in soccer jerseys and asking what it was like to play on a team with all boys, and they cheer when the character based on her life lines up a penalty kick, and their mothers say thank you as they exit the theater after seeing the movie, "Gracie." (See Post review.)

So in those moments, she's pretty sure.

Shue's oldest brother, Will, died in an accident in 1988 at age 26. He was, she says, like a surrogate parent -- the one who watched out for her in the tussle of a sports-centered, testosterone-driven family.

"That was such a big part of the story -- showing what it's like to lose the person who protected you in your life. And what it's like to carry on after something like that happened," she says, legs curled under her on the couch of a Georgetown hotel. "I wanted to make sure that was very sensitively and respectfully done."

It was Andrew Shue's idea. The former "Melrose Place" star -- who has gone on to live other lives as a professional soccer player, teacher and entrepreneur -- wanted to make an underdog movie about, and for, his deceased brother.

He began working on a script and broached the topic with Elisabeth, their other brother, John, and Elisabeth's husband, Davis Guggenheim, whose career was about to skyrocket with the release of his Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Initially the script was a fictional story about a boy based on Will Shue, but as family discussions of the project grew more serious, Guggenheim pushed to steer it more toward the truth and to tell it from the person he saw as the real underdog of the family -- Elisabeth.

"Davis . . . was really only interested in telling this story if we were willing to go a little closer to home," she says. "He wanted to tell a story that was really authentic and real."

The result is a tale about a wounded teenage girl who fights her way onto the boys' varsity soccer team in the late 1970s, taking the place of a brother who died in a car accident.

Elisabeth Shue says the film, in which she plays the mother in the family and Andrew Shue plays a soccer coach, is "80 to 85 percent completely true" to their own experiences, though events have been rearranged and characters have been tweaked.