One of the most haunting moments in The Shining comes when five-year-old Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd) rides his tricycle through the Overlook Hotel and sees the ghosts of twin girls along with visions of their gruesome murder. The twins tell him over and over again, “Come play with us, Danny.” The Shining was released over 40 years ago, and today it’s a horror classic, with the Grady Twins one of the most memorable images from the genre.
And, of course, with the movie being over 40 years old, the twins are grown up, too. Louise and Lisa Burns are now 54 years old, and they share updates about their lives on their social media accounts, where they go by The Shining Twins. The British actors recently made headlines when they posted about standing in line to see Queen Elizabeth II‘s coffin lie in state following her September 2022 death. Read on to see the twins in the queue and to find out more about their lives today.
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The Burns twins did not become professional actors after their roles in The Shining. They were only in one other project, which was just prior to The Shining: an episode of the British series Kids in 1979.
“We’d never been to stage school but we had done some TV work before and so we had an agent and she called our mum and said, ‘[Director] Stanley Kubrick is looking for sisters,'” Lisa told the Daily Mail in 2015.
The sisters did not make performing into their full-time careers, but they were interested in just that for a time.
“When I was younger it was a huge dream of mine to be a movie star like Judy Garland or Greta Garbo, real movie stars,” Louise told the Daily Mail. But, things changed when they were turned down for the The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). “I went to an audition for RADA and they said they couldn’t accept me because I’d been in the movie, that made me a professional actress and they didn’t accept professionals,” she explained.
So, they went down very different paths instead. According to the same interview, Lisa became a lawyer and Louise a published scientist.
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On their social media accounts, Louise and Lisa post about The Shining, including art from fans as well as photos of people and pets dressed up as their characters. The two are also available to record creepy greetings for fans on Cameo.
In the Daily Mail interview, they explained that they really enjoyed working on the movie, including bonding with Kubrick, who made sure to celebrate their 11th birthday on set, and Jack Nicholson, who Louise said was “just a regular person, in fact he was very sweet.”
One thing they didn’t like about the horror classic was their dresses. “We really hated them, they were horrible to wear and quite scratchy,” Louise explained. “Neither of us were particularly ‘girly’ as kids, so they weren’t our kind of clothes.”
Lisa and Louise stood in the upwards of 11-hour-long line to view Queen Elizabeth’s coffin lying in state at Westminster Hall on Sept. 18. They posted about their experience on social media.
“In the Queue! To view the Queen Lying in State,” they tweeted alongside a photo of their wristbands. They then posted updates from the line, including that they received a piece of cake while waiting, as well as photos of themselves in front of Tower Bridge and Big Ben. They even signed a fan’s shoes while in line.