When I was a kid (yes, I’m dating myself here), audiences fell in love with a young girl named Drew Barrymore who played the younger sister of the boy in E.T. who finds our cuddly, beloved extra-terrestrial.

She was the heir to one of Hollywood’s royal families, and we couldn’t get enough of this tow-headed girl. She blazed across screens in the movie version of Stephen King’s Firestarter. She was a stand-in for Gen Xers everywhere as a child of divorce in Irreconcilable Differences. She also melted down and became an alcoholic, pot smoker and coke addict – ending up in rehab by the time she was 14.

The next young blonde girl to wow us with her serious acting chops was Dakota Fanning. Born in 1994, nearly 20 years after Drew (who was born in 1975), she became a sensation before she was 10, much like Barrymore before her.

She managed to avoid the drugs and drink that temporarily brought down Barrymore – but in the elder blonde’s defense, her rise to stardom was in the 1970s – and has continued a successful career into adulthood. Both women have, actually.

Which brings us to today – the young, blonde actress with more talent than everyone else in her cast combined is Millie Bobby Brown.

Most of you have never heard of her, or even seen her. She’s had two roles: As young Alice in a few episodes of the short-lived Once Upon A Time In Wonderland, and as Madison O’Donnell in BBC America’s The Intruders.

Thing is, in The Intruders, (spoiler alert!), she plays both an innocent 9-year-old girl who just wants her mommy and a much, much older (who knows how old) evil killer named Marcus Fox. She plays them both so well that you feel desperately protective of Madison when she manages to claw her way out of the mental purgatory Marcus has put her in. And you see the absolute evil of Marcus that he doesn’t even care that he’s hunting and killing people in the body of a 9-year-old girl. You suspect he even enjoys it, because no one’s going to see that coming.

While I liked the show overall, I found it was the Madison/Marcus storyline that kept pulling me in. In part because I wanted to see if she’d be able to permanently push Marcus out, in part because I was in awe of the skill this young girl had to play this role so flawlessly.

Ms. Brown, we’ll be watching you.

Photo via The Intruders official site.