Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Children’s roles in American movies over the following
decades became less prominent as cultural attention
shifted to teenagers, and Hollywood followed accordingly. Only a handful of significant child performers
emerged in these years, and most enjoyed only one significant role as a child. Patty McCormack (b. 1945) was
one such case: she was astonishing as the evil little girl in
The Bad Seed (1956), then drifted into hipster teen roles
in the 1960s.
Similar cases in this period included Brandon de
Wilde (1942–1972), who won acclaim as an elevenyear-old in Shane (1953), one of the rare westerns with
a meaningful child’s role, then struggled to regain his
stature as a teenager, with only one further hit, Hud
(1963). At the age of sixteen, Patty Duke (b. 1946)
played Helen Keller as a child in The Miracle Worker
(1962), earning her the first Oscar won in competition
by a minor. Despite the successful television show she
starred in afterward, her subsequent career was inconsistent and troubled. Linda Blair (b. 1959) startled audiences at the age of twelve in The Exorcist (1973), in a
performance that was unimaginably demanding and disturbing and for which she was nominated for an
Academy Award. Thereafter, her roles and her movies were of little interest. Surprisingly, Tatum O’Neal
(b. 1963) beat out Blair for the Best Supporting Actress
Oscar in 1973 at only the age of ten, having starred
with her father in Paper Moon (1973), thereby becoming
the youngest person ever to win an Oscar in competition. Despite this enormous vote of confidence for her,
O’Neal did not do another film until she was a teenager,
when she had some success in The Bad News Bears (1976)
and Little Darlings (1980). Her roles since then have been
few and far between. At least two child stars of this era did maintain their
pre-adult notoriety over multiple films. One was British
starlet Hayley Mills (b. 1946), who began acting in
movies at thirteen, often playing characters younger than
herself and winning raves in her first three films: Tiger
Bay (1959), made in her homeland, and Pollyanna
(1960) and The Parent Trap (1961), her first US features.
She continued with child and teen roles that were generally less memorable, although she acts occasionally in
film and television roles to this day. Even more fortunate
in the long run was Ron Howard (b. 1954), a five-yearold at the time of his film debut, The Journey (1959), and
a star as a result of playing Opie on television’s The Andy
Griffith Show in the 1960s. Despite his duties for television, he continued in films like The Music Man (1962)
and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963), then found
even greater fame as a teenager in American Graffiti
(1973) and on the television series Happy Days. His
career was further advanced as a film director, and he
has primarily focused on directing since the 1980s.
Yet the most major child star of the 1970s, and one
whose prominence only grew with time, was Jodie Foster
(b. 1962). After numerous appearances in film and television starting at the age of seven, her breakthrough came
in the 1974 hit Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore when she
was eleven. She continued in roles that showcased her
acting skills, as was most evident in the films she made in
1976 alone. First she was a disarming child prostitute in
Taxi Driver, earning her first Academy Award nomination; next she played a gangster’s moll in a film with an
all-juvenile cast, Bugsy Malone; then she returned to a
more typical child’s role in Disney’s Freaky Friday. Foster
dropped out of films for the next few years and resisted
acting in movies as a high schooler, save her ensemble
role in Foxes (1980). After a few more films, she won her
first of two Oscars for The Accused (1988), and later
turned to producing and directing in her own right.
The 1980s offered a minimal assortment of roles for
child actors, because teen films once again took on a
prominence that had not been seen since the 1950s.
Most young actors in the 1980s actually debuted in
features as teens, such as Brooke Shields, Tom Cruise,
Kristy McNichol, Molly Ringwald, and Winona Ryder.
The few prominent child actors tended to have only one
or two films to call their own, such as nine-year-old
Ricky Schroder in The Champ (1979), who then moved
on to television roles as an adolescent, and eleven-yearold Henry Thomas, who was unforgettable in E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and then could not find another
strong role for over a decade. One of Thomas’s co-stars
in E.T., Drew Barrymore, had some success in her subsequent children’s roles in Firestarter (1984) and Cat’s Eye
(1985), but her greater fame came with her later adult
roles.