Her best work is a single held look, as a child, in A Little Princess. Two years later a dinosaur film had no idea what to do with her. She has worked steadily since, mostly in other people's television, and deserved a better second chance.
Fi1m perspective
The moment is snow through a skylight. In Alfonso Cuarón's A Little Princess (1995), Chester is Becky, the servant girl who sleeps in the next attic, and she wakes to find Sara treating a leak as a visitor. Steven Weisberg holds on her face, and what she does there is decide, slowly, whether to believe the other girl. She does not smile to help us along. She does not reach for the snow until she has made up her mind. It moved us more than two children in a cold room had any right to, and Chester's stillness does half the work, because a child who begged for our sympathy would have spoiled it.
That is the performance to click through to. The one most people know is the other. Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) made her Kelly Curtis, Jeff Goldblum's daughter, and our review put the problem in one sentence: she is on the island because the script needs a child there. She is given a father to worry about and little else. The exception is a moment in which Kelly's gymnastics dispatch a velociraptor, a stunt Chester performed herself and, by her own account, asked for: "I just was like, ‘Please give me a stunt scene. Please give me something crazy to do. I don’t want to just be a kid in this film. I want to do something badass.’" It is the one beat in the film that belongs to her, and it is over quickly.
The career around those two films is the ordinary one for a child actor of the mid-1990s. A debut in CB4 (1993), Harriet the Spy (1996) as Janie Gibbs, a bit part in She's All That (1999), and from there television: Malcolm in the Middle, The West Wing, Veronica Mars, one guest spot at a time. Occasional films have followed, Pretty Problems (2022) among them. We have not reviewed the television and will not pretend to, but the shape is plain enough. She has not been out of work; she has been out of parts that let her do what she did in that attic.
What she has, on the evidence we can point to, is a refusal to sell a scene. Cuarón and Weisberg trusted a child to think on camera and she did. Spielberg's film asked for a child who screams on cue and does a flip, and she did that too, well enough. Give her a director with the patience to hold on her face and she is worth the hold. We would be glad to be surprised by a small film that does.
Biography
Vanessa Lee Chester (also credited as Vanessa Chester) is an American actress. Born on 2 July 1984 in Brooklyn, New York, to Guyanese immigrant parents, she began her career as a child performer after moving to Los Angeles, where she appeared in commercials. Her early film roles included Becky in A Little Princess (1995) and Janie Gibbs in Harriet the Spy (1996).
She gained wider recognition for her role as Kelly Curtis in Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). Chester later appeared in supporting parts in films such as She's All That (1999) and 17 Again (2009), and in television series including Malcolm in the Middle (2000), The West Wing (1999), How I Met Your Mother (2005) and Veronica Mars (2004). She graduated from the University of Southern California in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics. Chester received a Young Artist Award for her performance in Harriet the Spy and was nominated for Saturn and Image Awards for The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
