Child Actors

THE WORLD WAR II ERA

The war changed many cultural attitudes, both in the United States and abroad, and afterward children were viewed as less carefree and more conflicted. Perhaps the actor best exemplifying this change was Roddy McDowall (1928–1998), who started making films in Britain at the age of eight and became a star with his first Hollywood film, How Green Was My Valley (1941), when he was thirteen. McDowall's performance as a boy in a Welsh mining town was imbued with tender torment, and he brought that same sensitivity to his subsequent films, such as My Friend Flicka (1943). Another impressive actor of the war years was Margaret O'Brien (b. 1937), who began acting when she was four and found stardom the next year as the title character of Journey for Margaret (1942), a film about an English girl orphaned during the war. O'Brien appeared in eight films over the next two years, including Lost Angel (1943) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), earning her a special Academy Award ^® as the "outstanding child actress of 1944." Her output nonetheless slowed thereafter, although she won praise in the prominent role of Beth in Little Women (1949). Unlike McDowall, whose further acting work was prodigious, O'Brien had few notable roles after the early 1950s.

The child actor who can best make the claim for avoiding the curse of obscurity is Elizabeth Taylor (b. 1932), whose fame only increased as she aged beyond adolescence. Taylor started in movies in 1942 at the age of ten, with a striking beauty and endearing pathos that made her a sensation in Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944). She moved into teenage roles with ease, and unlike most other child stars, Taylor moved into adult roles while still in her teens, getting married at eighteen in Father of the Bride (1950) and having a child the next year in the sequel, Father's Little Dividend (1951). Her success grew even greater over the next two decades, making her one of the biggest stars in Hollywood history.

Another success story is that of Natalie Wood (1938–1981), whose performance as a skeptical child doubting the existence of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) was further evidence of the hardening attitudes behind children's roles after the war. She continued in many minor films through the rest of her childhood and found her foremost roles later playing teenagers. Still, for every Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood, there were numerous fading child stars like Bobby Driscoll (1937–1968), notable in Song of the South (1946) and Treasure Island (1950) but out of work by his early twenties, then dead at thirty-one, and Claude Jarman, Jr. (b. 1934), who won a special Academy Award ^® at the age of twelve for his very first film, The Yearling (1946), made a few movies as a teen, and finished acting for the big screen at twenty-two.