Child Actors

INTERNATIONAL CHILD ACTORS

Meanwhile, child actors in a number of international films after the war were becoming well known, even if they did not enjoy the ongoing publicity that the Hollywood studio system provided. Italian neorealist films, for instance, utilized nonprofessional child performers in films such as Roma, città aperta ( Rome, Open City , 1945), Ladri di biciclette ( Bicycle Thieves , 1948), Germania anno zero ( Germany Year Zero , 1948), and Sciuscià ( Shoeshine , 1946), in which Franco Interlenghi (b. 1931) made his debut and began his lengthy film career. Another nonprofessional, Subir Bannerjee, was extraordinary as the child protagonist in Pather Panchali ( Song of the Road , 1955), made by Indian director Satyajit Ray (1921–1992), although he did not appear in any notable films thereafter. François Truffaut (1932–1984) was so taken with Jean-Pierre Léaud (b. 1944), who played the French director's childhood doppelgänger Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre cent coups ( The 400 Blows , 1959), that he cast him again in four more films as the same character growing up through the years. Andrei Tarkovsky also found a persuasive child actor, Nikolai Burlyayev, to play the lead in his Russian debut feature, Ivanovo detstvo ( Ivan's Childhood , 1962), and the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman made effective use of Jörgen Lindström in Tystnaden ( The Silence , 1963). Yet most of these films gained their recognition because of the influence of the auteur theory in the 1960s, and few child actors gained any lasting attention outside of US films.

This marginalizing began to change for international child actors starting in the 1980s, when many films about juvenile issues reached wide audiences. Pixote (1981) was one such example from Brazil, in which Fernando Ramos Da Silva played the tragic title character. Oscar ^® nominations propelled the popularity of other films like the Swedish Mitt liv som hund ( My Life as a Dog , 1985), featuring Anton Glanzelius; the French Au revoir les Lindstro enfants (1987), starring Gaspard Manesse; the Danish film Pelle erobreren ( Pelle the Conqueror , 1987), with Pelle Hvenegaard in the title role; and the Italian film Cinema Paradiso (1989), in which Salvatore Cascio plays the boyhood role of the adult protagonist. With her impressive performance in The Piano (New Zealand, 1993), Canadian Anna Paquin (b. 1982) became the youngest non-American ever to win an Oscar ^® for a supporting role. Fame came to other international child stars thereafter, such as Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter (Canada, 1997), Juan José Ballesta in El Bola (Spain, 2000), Jamie Bell in Billy Elliot (Great Britain, 2000), and Marina Golbahari in Osama (Afghanistan, 2003). Then in 2004, another New Zealand film made Academy Awards ^® history when its star, Keisha Castle-Hughes (b. 1990), became the first child ever nominated for the Best Actress Oscar ^® , after she commanded global acclaim for her lead role in Whale Rider (2002).