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BYNES TO STUDY AT NYU?
04/10/2005
Young actress AMANDA BYNES is set to follow in the footsteps of fellow teen queens MARY-KATE and ASHLEY OLSEN, by studying at New York University.
The WHAT A GIRL WANTS star, 19, graduated from California's Thousand Oaks High School in 2004 and is currently filming the fourth season of her TV show with JENNIE GARTH, WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU.
However, a friend tells gossip site The Scoop, Bynes has applied to the Manhattan college with the hope of starting next year (06).
The pal says, "She wants a college education.
"I don't know how that will affect her acting career, but she definitely wants to do it."
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Amanda Bynes stars in the WB sitcom What I Like About You, with Jennie Garth as her sister. Bynes is another mass-produced celebrity, a tweener star of the late 1990s -- not as buxom or wild as Lindsay Lohan, not as blond, bland and talentless as Hilary Duff.
Bynes' father is a dentist who occasionally moonlights as a stand-up comedian. He enrolled Amanda in "stand-up comedy classes" when she was 10, and her timing, delivery, and cuteness impressed Dan Schneider. "She was just on fire," says Schneider. "She was great. She had this natural charisma on stage. You know, she was the size of an avocado, but she was hysterical, and she just totally won over the audience."
Almost immediately Bynes was a regular on Nickelodeon's All That, where Schneider was a writer. He created Bynes' The Amanda Show, an adolescents' sketch comedy show that ran three seasons. Among the running jokes, Bynes played both herself and her unlucky biggest fan, desperately trying (but always failing) to meet Bynes. It was funnier than it sounds, but not much, unless you were 13 like she was.
Schneider also wrote Bynes' big-screen debut Big Fat Liar, co-starring Frankie Muñiz, and was co-creator and a regular writer of What I Like About You. The sitcom, of course, is filler between the commercials, but Bynes has talent and can be mildly amusing.
She voiced cartoon characters in Charlotte's Web 2 and Robots, and starred in What A Girl Wants, a remake of Sandra Dee's 1958 The Reluctant Debutante, with a slumming Colin Firth.
In a trivial yet calculated move, the publicity poster for What A Girl Wants -- with Bynes flashing a playful peace sign in front of two Royal Guardsmen -- was electronically altered to eliminate the peace sign. The film, of course, had no political content (it was even cross-promoted with a product placement contest on Bynes' sitcom). But the studio was worried that the original poster might somehow signal opposition to the then-simmering war between America and Iraq. The film's director said that, in the original poster, Bynes "looked like Susan Sarandon at the Oscars."
Bynes' next project is Lovewrecked, a 'romantic comedy' on a desert island that sounds like another chaste Sandra Dee resurrection. Teenaged girls will no doubt buy tickets, but if Bynes is going to survive as a grown-up actress she'll need to grow up soon, before her audience loses their pimples and loses interest.
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