TelevisionAcademy.com 71had a song to perform for the family. Then, after doing that number, she
launched into another. And then another. And another, until her mom finally
told her to stop. Which she did, but only temporarily.
Inspired by the Shirley Temple films she used to watch on TV on weekend
afternoons (“I used to sit on the couch looking out our picture window at a big
oak tree and imagine myself being in her movies”), Heaton started singing on
the playground of the Catholic school she attended.
“She was an extremely precocious performer,” remembers her older
brother, Michael. “In the second grade, I believe she sang the entire first side
of Barbra Streisand’s Color Me Barbra album for her class. And it was maybe
in the fifth grade when she and her friends staged a version of West Side
Story on roller skates on the loading dock of our local grocery store.”
Eventually, she was writing plays about magic and fairies and then
putting them on in the family driveway, charging neighbors to set up lawn
chairs to watch.
“I was bossy and loud,” Heaton recalls with a laugh. “There were two ofJUMPSUIT BY MISSONI; JEWELRY BY MARTIN KATZ LTD