A Cry for Help Was Heard In the Land. And it Came From Me!

OK, people. This is serious! I can't rest, I mean really rest, until I get help with this one. Tonight we were minding our business, watching the 2003 Eloise Christmas movie, when a character named Peabody greeted his daughter, home from school in Europe. The daughter was played by someone with a face I knew. I didn't just know it like you know the face of a sales clerk at the store. I knew her face like I know the faces of my own children. It was powerfully familiar to me. I have spent hours now trying to recall where I've seen her before.

I wore out Google's limited usefulness. Those "filmographies" are a joke. They are far from being exhaustive lists of someone's work. But it did help me find her name. Sarah Topham. She has been in a couple of these Eloise movies, but I've never seen one of those until tonight. She's done a lot of stage work in Tennessee Williams stuff like The Glass Menagerie. She's also done Shakespeare on the stage. Merchant of Venice. That sort of thing.

But those are not the places where I've seen her before. I've seen her in something that mattered, I think. There's something about her eyes that makes me feel that the story or stories in which I first saw her must have been riveting, even upsetting. Or maybe it just entertained me a lot. I just can't remember.

And so I cast myself on the mercy and superior memories of the younger readers and former students out there who might know all and tell all concerning the silver screen or the small one. Who is Sarah Topham? What has she been in other than the things I've cited above? Please help me with this. As they used to say in the College Fund commercial, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." And mine is just about wasted trying to figure out who this lady is and where I've seen her before. Mille grazie!