I love finding show business dynasties I’ve never heard of before. Obviously these are minor ones—we’re not talking Barrymores, here. But the Wilhoit family has been working on creating the sound of movies and TV for three generations now, with only the three youngest members in the industry having gone in front of the camera. At that, Lisa Wilhoit is now primarily doing voice work, including ADR and other things I’m not a hundred percent sure I understand. Meaning she, too, is a child actress who went on to have a career that didn’t involve being on camera and seems to have settled nicely into life instead of going off the rails.
Her grandfather was a composer and music editor, probably best known for 119 of the 120 episodes of The Fugitive. (No, I don’t know what the deal was with the other one.) Her father is a sound editor who has worked with everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Muppets, among other things doing ADR supervising and editing for Prince of Egypt. An uncle is a foley artist with a similarly broad career, reaching from Fern Gully to the Spider-Verse. A pair of cousins, sons of the foley artist, were on Full House, quit acting afterward, and joined the rest of the family in the sound department.
Lisa Wilhoit, meanwhile, may have gotten her acting start playing literal baby Julia Roberts in Hook—surprisingly, she was the only one of the family involved, if IMDb is correct—but will forever be known as Danielle Chase, the younger sister of Angela on My So-Called Life. While she’s only the focus of the show on the episode “Weekend,” there are several other moments where we get a glimpse into her life, and young Lisa played the character perfectly.
When you are a parent, you are often forced to give more attention to one child than the other regardless of your feelings for the kids themselves simply because one needs more work. Danielle was in junior high. She had an easier life than Angela’s. Let’s leave aside that she wasn’t as far along the hormonal roller coaster as Angela. She also has no friends who have nearly died of an overdose, none who have been kicked out of their family homes. Angela needs more, so she pulls attention away. That’s not Patty’s fault. That’s the nature of their lives.
Wilhoit never let the audience forget her, though. Whether it’s her delivery of the line “it means bisexual” in regards to Angela’s reference to Rickie as bi or her goofing around in “Other People’s Mothers,” she’s a believable kid of her age. But there’s also the moment in “Halloween” where she dresses up as Angela and does a pitch-perfect impersonation of her older sister’s drama. “The Zit,” where Angela does not want to do the mother-daughter fashion show and Danielle desperately does. Danielle will not be forgotten, just as it would have been wrong to forget Lisa Wilhoit.
