When Tami Stronach was 10, she captivated young audiences as the childlike empress in the 1984 film The story without end. It was her first and last major acting role in a feature film – until now.
Exactly 40 years after the cult film, Stronach returns to the big screen in another fantasy film, Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand StepsShe plays the Witch in a cast that includes Christopher Lloyd, Sean Astin, Michael Emerson and her husband, Greg Steinbruner, who wrote the script and plays the Goatherd.
“It’s absolutely insane to go back into film as a woman in your 50s,” Stronach told Yahoo Entertainment. “It’s like everything in our society tells you it’s the wrong move — but that’s the move I’m making,” she laughs.
It took four years to Man and Witchwhich opens in theaters July 28 and 30 — and a gentle nudge from her husband. Stronach left Hollywood just as she was getting her big break. She later became a contemporary dancer and choreographer. She started her own dance company in 2000 and co-founded (with Steinbruner) the entertainment studio Paper Canoe Company, which creates family-oriented content for stage and screen, 10 years ago when their daughter Maya was born. (Maya also has a role in Man and Witch.)
“I was acting, I just wasn’t acting in movies,” Stronach explained. “It was really my husband. He said, ‘Don’t you think you should do one more movie on your bucket list?’ I said, ‘Why? We have our own lives and all our projects.’ He said, ‘Let’s just do a 10-minute short film.’ I said, ‘Okay, that’ll be fun.’ And then the short film turned into a feature film script that I got on my birthday. It was a very romantic gift — and a challenge.” (Stronach also made a cameo as himself in the 2018 film Ultra low).
Stronach incorporated her dance background into the film, which finds the Goatherd turning to the Witch to undo a spell that has kept him from finding true love. She also serves as an executive producer.
“It was a huge learning curve,” she said. “Besides the greatness of being able to act in a movie again, in a script that I loved, with my family, a great director and cast, I was also able to grow as a person” as a producer and “guarding the female characters and making sure that I felt they were progressive and reflective of our time. It’s a nostalgic ’80s movie, but we have our [strong] female characters in 2024.”
Making movies today versus 1984 is a world of difference. Stronach, the daughter of two archaeologists, was just a kid in San Francisco musical theater when a casting director scouted her and cast her in Wolfgang Petersen‘S The never ending story. She spent her summer in Bavaria, in southeastern Germany, for the three-month filming, living in a hotel with her young co-stars Noah Hathaway (Atreyu) and Barrett Oliver (Bastian). They swam together in the pool, raced up and down the elevators, and banged on each other’s doors. It was like summer camp for Hollywood child stars.
She loved the “magical world” Petersen created for Michael Ende’s film adaptation of the book, set in Fantasia, featuring Falkor the luck dragon and a quest for the Auryn medallion, but she knows her experience on set wouldn’t hold up today.
“I don’t think you could do what we did back then with the child labor laws and everything,” Stronach said. “We were on set 10 hours a day. We were there all day. I mean, I loved it. I would wander through the different rooms and talk to the makeup artists. The stunt guy and I became friends. I hung out with the artistic crew backstage a lot, and they would take me to the English beer gardens. I wasn’t allowed to drink beer because I was 10, but they taught me tricks. I can do all those roller coaster tricks because I spent so much time in the beer gardens with the crew on The never ending story.”
Stronach was still very much a child, and even lost teeth — prominent incisors — during the filming of the movie. Petersen “was not happy about it at all,” she recalls, laughing.
She spent two weeks in a dentist’s chair getting dentures made to go over her existing teeth. The dentures “looked really weird,” she said. “If you stop and pause, you can see the dentures.” It also caused her to lisp. Fortunately, her adult teeth broke through at the end of the shoot and the dentures were thrown away.
“My teeth had grown enough that Wolfgang said, ‘Don’t smile. Have a calm, serious face. If you have to smile, smile only with your lips, [no teeth],’” she recalled. “My husband, who is also a director, said to me, ‘I think Wolfgang telling you not to smile to cover your teeth was actually an interesting bit of direction. It created a kind of containment — your face doesn’t move much — and it gives it a gravitas.’ I thought, Yeah, so mysterious, so serious — and really just trying to hide my teeth.”
Stronach’s college-educated parents were “so ill-prepared” for her sudden fame, which included the release of a pop album, Fairy Queen (recorded in one day during the film trip in Germany).
“We really had no idea,” she said. “We were surprised at every step — surprised at the size of it when we arrived,” not realizing it was the most expensive film ever produced in Germany at the time, “surprised at the scope of it after it was released, surprised at its staying power.”
It brought unwanted attention to Stronach, who returned to California to continue her studies. Men camped outside her house. She received marriage proposals and offers for nude film roles. These incidents played a role in her family’s decision to end her Hollywood career when it was just beginning.
It was clear: “Here’s the door that you can either walk through — and you’re going to have to navigate a lot of that — or you can wait until you’re 18 and see what you want to do then,” she said. “It seemed like a no-brainer to be honest with you. I really threw myself into dance and kept acting [in theater] so I didn’t necessarily feel like I was cut off from my creativity. It was just, if you want to make film, you do it as an adult.”
As I grew up, “it’s so hard to get off the dance train. There’s nothing more fun, but eventually your body just gives out,” Stronach laughs. “I always had it in my head that I would eventually get back into acting. I was still jumping into plays all the time during my dancing life. When my daughter was born, my husband and I started doing more theater. It just started to appeal to me.”
She couldn’t avoid signs of encouragement along the way as she began testing the waters. The theme song from “NeverEnding Story” surfaced in a 2019 episode of Strange things. The show’s Millie Bobby Brown turned it into a viral dance challenge, when a Spotify ad — featuring a Falkor — appeared on a billboard outside her house.
“It was just, what’s happening? It was gone from my life for 30 years and then it was everywhere,” she said. It all became “one more finger on my back saying, Come on, Tami. Take a risk. Make the movie.“Well, here she is.
