The Shining

Scream Meets the Grady Twins!

Louise and Lisa Burns were only eleven years old when they appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The sisters played the Grady twins, ghosts of girls who were murdered in the Overlook Hotel and went on to haunt young Danny Torrance, the son of the building’s new residents. The Grady twins became iconic horror characters. Their scenes are some of the most frightening in horror film history but the sisters who played them never acted again, opting to instead follow different career paths. Lisa is now a Criminal Lawyer and Louise, a published Scientist/ Teacher, but both expressed a strong interest in returning to acting and horror filmmaking.

SCREAM’s Daniel Goodwin met up with the sisters in a former Elizabethan coaching tavern on the leafy outskirts of London and were delighted to discover they were nothing like the cold-eyed ghosts they played in the horror masterpiece. The three of us ordered drinks: a Chilean red wine (not rum) for Lisa and a soft drink for Louise (as she was driving) then found a quiet corner in the pub. Louise and Lisa hauled up old memories from their time working with Stanley Kubrick on one of the greatest horror films ever made. They also talked about how The Shining affected their adult lives and what they both hope for the future.

SCREAM: How did you go about landing the parts of the Grady twins?

LOUISE: It was a public audition. They were originally advertising for just sisters. We came up to London for the day and dad said even if we didn’t get the parts we could get to look around a movie studio.

LISA: I think there were about three thousand people who auditioned. We were interviewed by the casting director and that’s how we got to meet Stanley. I think he might have been there initially but in a room away from everyone else. There was a filtering process before we met him.