For her entire life, that phrase, or a variation of it, haunted Prudence Russell. She was born to a poor Southern family, a family that struggled to make ends meet, a family that wasn't particularly happy. Her parents married young, right out of college, and the romance cooled sooner rather than later, went out completely when their first and only child was born. To fill the unhappy hours, Melanie Russell doted on her daughter. She showered young Prudence with the love, affection and attention that she lacked from her husband. She could have easily made her daughter spoiled, but their lack of access made that difficult. Rather than shower her daugheter with things, Melanie pushed her own goals and dreams onto her young daughter, entering her into pagents. Prudence was a beautiful young girl and she liked the attention her mother gave her when she performed well. But the idea that she would only ever be a pretty face, that she would never amount to anything, would take some of the shine out of her world.
When pagents failed to make Melanie feel important, and when Prudence began to lose because her heart wasn't in the endeavor anymore, if it ever had been, Melanie found a new way to use her daughter to feel fulfilled. Prudence began to model and to book small commercials of no consequence, generally playing the child that has a vapid but adorable look about them. The pate to acting was something that Melanie started her daughter on, something Melanie wanted for herself, but Prudence was the one who had to put in the time, who had to spend hours in front of a camera, in makeup and being told what to do and where to go by directors. It wasn't a childhood, but the older she got and the more she was aware of how little her parents liked one another, the more she became to want and need the work that she continued to steadily book.
At the age of eleven, Prudence got what would be considered to be her big break. She made the jump from modeling and commercials to the big screen. Her transition would be slow but steady. As she began to make her mark, some in the industry wanted to position her as the next indie darling. She was beautiful, etherial, and she took direction like she was made to. She had a innate desire and need to make people happy. She wanted to become more than she was born to be, but she didn't know how to escape the prophesy that she would never amount to anything. That desire, however, made her an unfortunate target for people in the industry who wanted nothing more than to prey on that kind of want and desire. In her late teens, Prudence was brought under the wing of one of the more influential people in Hollywood. He gave her access. He gave her status. He gave her acceptance. He gave her all the things she had always wanted. She simply never noticed what she was giving up in return.
Through the connections she seemed to have over night, Prudence found herself on a slippery slope, but she was so blinded by the things the man could give her that she didn't see it until it was too late. A mixture of drugs and alcohol, and rumors fueled by the man himself, led to a sharp decline in work. With her career on a precipice, people simply didn't want to work with her anymore. As work and connections started to dry up, the more the once shining star that was Prudence Russell became more and more tarnished. By the time she was 21, her life had sunk so low that the once budding starlet found herself in rehab with a lifelong coke problem.
When she left rehab, the world she had left behind had turned its back on her. She was the same girl, a beauty, a talent, but she could no longer move up in the world. She was, once again, nothing more than a pretty face. She worked slowly but diligently to get work again, resisting the urge to go home to her parents, now divorced, and become nothing more than a failed former beauty pagent winner, a face many would recognize but not be able to place. She began t get work again, but her credibility was shot. Her dalliance with men of power followed her wherever she went, and often, they tried to repeat the cycle with her. Sometimes she obliged, at least gave the illusion of obliging, and sometimes it flat out lost her work. But she lived a life of inconsistency, always on the cusp of either greatness, or extreme defeat.