Emmy and Tony winner Cynthia Nixon was just 12 when she starred in the summer camp romp Little Darlings, but her role in the gently radical movie was a sign of things to come.
The 1980 film stars Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal as teen rivals in a race to lose their virginity before the embers of the final campfire of the summer have been extinguished. Outwardly, was akin to deflowering flicks that featured teen boys, like (1981) and the Tom Cruise starrer (1982). , which happened to star three young women who would later come out (Nixon, O’Neal, and McNichol), broke ground by featuring teen girls speaking frankly about sex and desire. And that riled critics in a way that teen boys eager to explore sex hadn’t. The movie set at Camp Little Wolf was a harbinger of Nixon’s career of starring in projects like and , which upend the status quo while celebrating women’s sexual agency and friendship.
