Playing Sick - Backstage.com
In House's second season, Lippens and Laffin tapped a 10-year-old from South Africa whom they had noticed in a remake of the series Family Affair. Sasha Pieterse's character became the centerpiece of an episode titled "Autopsy," which won the Writers Guild Award for episodic drama in 2006. Sasha played Andie, a cancer-stricken girl who wants to live as long as she can for fear of leaving her single mother alone. This means a couple of rather gruesome surgeries. And, having never been kissed, she asks one of the doctors for that honor. In addition to the intense emotional terrain that Sasha had to cover for the role, she also had to undergo donning a bald cap and several hours of makeup. The production team half-jokingly gave her the option of shaving her head for veracity, but Pieterse and her mother, Zizi, declined, opting instead for those extra hours in the makeup chair.
By the time the cameras rolled, Sasha didn't look her best. Veins shot through her bald cap. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were bleached and special contacts were inserted to make her eye appear to bleed. She had a gruesome scar on her chest for a surgical incision and IVs going into her arms. Pictures sent back home to the child's grandmother in South Africa were, the Pieterses say, not the easiest to stomach. Sasha even took home an unwanted souvenir from one session in the makeup chair: a bit of glue, used to pin back her hair, that had gotten lodged in her ear. "It started hurting after a while, so we went to the doctor, who took it out," Sasha says. "They were so freaked out because they didn't know what it was." Young though she was, the actor knew something about the disease and about medical situations. An aunt lost a leg to diabetes. Her grandfather had cancer, and a few months prior to getting the role, Sasha had visited young cancer patients as part of a program called Lollipop. "I could think about my grandfather, my aunt, and God, too," Sasha recalls. "The woman who played my mother, Jewel Christian, had to cry a lot. She was amazing. And Hugh Laurie helped me a lot to get to that emotional stage. He got me into character and made me really feel like I had cancer -- like I was about to die."
An Elite Corps
"Sasha's been in the business for so long. We've always been open with her and tried to explain as much as possible," Zizi Pieterse says. "A lot of it depends on how the parents deal with it. It's extremely important for children at a young age like that to realize that it's make-believe."
Read Full Article Here