Actress Elisabeth Shue knows what it’s like to be a pioneer.
In 1972, 9-year-old Shue became the first girl in South Orange and Maplewood, N.J., to play organized soccer with and against boys.
“There was no other choice back then. There was no girls team to play on,” said Shue, 43, the Oscar-nominated star of “Leaving Las Vegas.”
Shue’s four-year soccer career (she quit when she was 13) in part inspired the movie “Gracie,” which opens Friday.
It’s set in 1978, and 15-year-old Gracie Bowen (Carly Schroeder) comes to terms with the sudden death of her older brother by training hard and trying to take his place on the boys varsity soccer team. Shue and Dermot Mulroney play her parents.
Gracie’s would-be male teammates resent her presence and foul her brutally. In real life, it was the 5-foot-2 Shue who set the tone with the boys’ teams.
“I was kind of tough, because I grew up with brothers, and I was second-oldest, so I knew how to beat up on guys,” she said. “I didn’t like them treating me differently because I was the only girl, so I would start out every game slide-tackling a few of them, just to let them know not to mess with me.”
It was with a tender touch, however, that she and her family fashioned “Gracie” from Shue’s real-life story.
The idea originated with Shue’s younger brother, Andrew, 40, who played Billy Campbell on TV’s “Melrose Place.” In “Gracie” he plays as a high school history teacher and soccer coach. The movie was directed by Shue’s husband, Davis Guggenheim, director of the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
They all, along with Shue sibling John, served as the film’s producers.
“Gracie” is dedicated to the memory of Will Shue, their older brother who died in a 1988 accident during a family vacation.
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“Andrew wanted very much to find a story where he could honor Will, and it came into focus once he enlisted Davis’ help,” Shue said. “Davis was interested in doing something on Will when he was alive — because Will had this wonderful underdog spirit — and told Andrew, ‘One of the underdogs in your family was your sister, and you could tell both those stories: What it’s like to lose someone you love, and what it was like to be [Elisabeth] in the family.'”
“Looking back now,” Andrew said in a separate interview, “I get to see how tough it was for my sister because of being the only girl, as opposed to seeing that she was special and unique.”
Andrew was 5 or 6 when his sister made the boys soccer team and doesn’t remember it being odd until he saw her photograph in the newspaper.
“I was surprised they were making a big deal about it, I think, because I was young, and she was playing with us all the time,” he said. “It seemed natural that she would be playing with boys. She was a great player.”