From Adolescence to ET: The 15 greatest child performances

Telegraph

18-03-2025

The Netflix series Adolescence has been deservedly much praised, both for the performances by Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty – reunited after the similarly lauded A Thousand Blows – and for the young actor Owen Cooper. The 14-year old debutant gives an astonishing performance as Jamie, a schoolboy accused of killing his schoolmate Katie. The show's director Philip Barantini told Variety that 'he just absolutely blew me away. Actors train for years and years and still can't really master what Owen has mastered, which is basically just being in the moment and listening and being truthful.'
Cooper is now surely destined for a long and successful acting career, but the same cannot be said of all child actors, who often find the transition to mature adult roles difficult. For every Natalie Portman and Christian Bale, there is a Mara Wilson or Haley Joel Osment. It has not helped that showbusiness has had the old adage 'never work with children or animals' (apparently coined by WC Fields, who loathed both) in place for the best part of a century.
It has also stymied child actors that, for decades during Golden Age Hollywood, they were either presented as tooth-rottingly sweet and winsome, or alternatively played by performers several years too old. Perhaps most notoriously, Judy Garland was 16 when she was cast as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: L Frank Baum's original conception of the character was as someone of around 10 or 11.
There was, naturally, a darker side to all this, too. Graham Greene attracted opprobrium when he wrote in the magazine Night and Day, of Shirley Temple in the film Wee Willie Winkie: 'Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece… [now] her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry…Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.'
It was strong stuff – the outcry resulted in Greene fleeing to Mexico – but he had also hit on an undesirable truth, namely that the children presented on screen were self-aware adults in miniature, and therefore as much objects of fantasy to the depraved as the more conventional stars of the day were.
This presentation has gradually shifted in cinema, especially over the past half-century. To watch the work of Temple and her male counterpart Mickey Rooney is to take a strange and unenjoyable step back into an unremitting cutesiness, the cinematic equivalent of 'Kids say the funniest things'. And British cinema was no better, either. Celia Johnson's children in the otherwise peerless Brief Encounter are so loathsome that it seems bizarre that she doesn't abandon the spoilt, entitled horrors for a chance of true happiness with Trevor Howard's sensitive doctor.
Yet as soon as talented child actors were allowed to be natural – sometimes under the tutelage of brilliant directors, and sometimes through happy circumstance – they thrived on screen, and the results have been much more enjoyable to watch. Here, then are 15 of the greatest child performances ever given (in chronological order).
1. Jean-Pierre Léaud, The 400 Blows, 1959
At a time when both American and British cinema were all too happy to lean into the idea of the child as either cutesy mascot or prematurely wise sage, Francois Truffaut's masterly account of the travails of the youthful and rebellious Antoine Doinel, a Parisian schoolboy in constant conflict with his family and teachers, proved revelatory.
As played by the young, untrained Jean-Pierre Léaud, Doinel is a naturalistic and wholly fascinating figure, an everyboy who, through Truffaut's poetic direction, gradually comes on to assume dimensions far beyond his straitened circumstances, building up to the film's famous closing shot. Such was Truffaut's affection for both actor and character – which he freely admitted was a semi-autobiographical version of himself – that Doinel later returned in four further short and feature films that the director made.
2. David Bradley, Kes, 1969
Ken Loach may have long since slid into self-parodying agitprop, but his masterly adaptation of Barry Hines's novel managed a rare combination of humour, pathos and social realism, all anchored in first-time child actor David Bradley's heartbreaking performance as 15 year-old Billy, a no-hoper living in an equally hopeless South Yorkshire mining town. His life is enlivened by his unlikely friendship with a tame kestrel, which brings light and interest into his grim existence for the first time, until tragedy eventually strikes.
Bradley – not to be confused with the well-respected character actor best known for his performance as Argus Filch in the Harry Potter films – is so unaffected and natural that watching him feels like observing an exercise in documentary realism, to unforgettable effect.
3. Jodie Foster, Taxi Driver, 1976
Jodie Foster has for so long been part of Hollywood's A-list as actress and director alike that it still comes as a shock to return to Martin Scorsese's masterly Taxi Driver and see her on-screen as Iris: the 12-year old child prostitute who Robert De Niro's increasingly deranged eponymous cabbie Travis Bickle decides to make it his mission to rescue from the degradation that she faces. Foster had been acting in Disney films for years, and had worked with Scorsese in his 1974 picture Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More, but she wanted to take on more mature, challenging roles.
Well, they don't get much more mature and challenging than her performance here, which catapulted her into the glittering career that she has enjoyed ever since. The role also led John Hinckley Jr to become obsessed by her, after watching the film multiple times. After he failed to contact her, he attempted to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan to impress her, meaning that there is a good argument for describing it as the most consequential of all the films on this list.
4. Danny Lloyd, The Shining, 1980
It took an exceptional child actor to embody the character of the clairvoyant Danny in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel, and after a long and exhaustive search, Kubrick and his assistant Leon Vitali found him in the form of the six year old Danny Lloyd. He had no previous acting experience, but managed to embody intense concentration for long periods, and – incredibly – was not made aware of the horrors depicted on screen.
There is a persistent story that he believed he was making a light-hearted comedy, and was shocked when he finally was allowed to see the finished film. The unusual approach paid off magnificently. Lloyd is by turns chilling, sympathetic and otherworldly, brilliantly conveying the sense of a child facing supernatural powers and terrors far beyond his understanding and imagination. He gave up acting almost immediately afterwards, though Mike Flanagan persuaded him to return for a brief, totemic cameo in the belated sequel Doctor Sleep.
5. Henry Thomas, E.T The Extra Terrestrial, 1982
It is almost unfair to single out one child actor from Steven Spielberg's eternal fantasy classic. Amidst a supporting cast that includes a very young Drew Barrymore, Robert MacNaughton and future Brat Pack star C. Thomas Howell, however, it is Henry Thomas (who, coincidentally, would also appear in Doctor Sleep) as the young Elliott Taylor who stands out. Spielberg has always had a rare gift for directing children, and in Thomas he found perhaps his finest ever child star.
The actor showed considerable chutzpah by turning up for his audition dressed as Indiana Jones – the previous year's Raiders of the Lost Ark had been an enormous hit – and Spielberg's faith in him and the rest of the young cast was rewarded by their beautifully modulated and often very funny performances. The film-maker so enjoyed the experience of making E.T – for many people, still his finest film – with Thomas and the others that he later commented that it made him want to start a family of his own. There can be little higher praise.
6. Christian Bale, Empire of the Sun, 1987
Spielberg's knack for spotting talent was again demonstrated a few years later when he cast the young Welsh actor Christian Bale in the pivotal role of Jim Graham in his WWII epic Empire of the Sun, based on JG Ballard's autobiographical (and atypical) 1984 novel. Now that Bale has gone on to become an A-list star, and an Oscar winner to boot, it is almost a shock to come back to his early performance here, as he plays someone who has to grow up very, very quickly in the grim surroundings of a Japanese internment camp.
Spielberg surrounds Bale with a starry, largely British cast – Nigel Havers, Miranda Richardson, Leslie Phillips, as well as John Malkovich and a young Ben Stiller – which would be painful if his young lead was not up to the job. Thankfully, Bale shows a preternatural stillness and intensity here, which would later make him magnificent as Bateman and Batman alike.
7. Macaulay Culkin, Home Alone, 1990
As Kieran Culkin collected his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor this year, his elder brother Macaulay might have been forgiven for looking on with a sense of wry envy. After all, for a period in the early Nineties, he was the biggest child star since Rooney and Temple, all thanks to the extraordinary success of the abandoned-boy comedy Home Alone and its subsequent (and funnier) sequel.
Culkin Sr soon became a whipping boy for the jealous and his career subsequently plummeted, which is why it's salutary to go back to his first two performances as the accidentally neglected Kevin Mac Allister and enjoy a masterclass in pitch-perfect comic timing, in which he displays the deadpan physical humour of Charlie Chaplin but in a pre-pubescent boy's body. His natural charm and likeability even allows him to get away with acts of appalling (if cartoonish) violence which, by the sequel, feel less like a child defending his home and more a budding psychopath taking revenge on criminals: a switch that Culkin deals with extremely entertainingly indeed.
8. Anna Paquin, The Piano, 1993
When Anna Paquin won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her brilliant performance in Jane Campion's The Piano, she was not the youngest recipient of the award – she was 11, just a year older than Tatum O'Neal, who had won for Paper Moon two decades before – but it was undoubtedly one of the most challenging roles that a child had ever taken on, let alone won such deserved recognition for.
Paquin's character Flora is the daughter of Holly Hunter's mute pianist Ada, exiled to New Zealand for an arranged marriage to a man she has never met, and the child's inadvertent betrayal of her mother's romantic involvement with another man (with echoes of LP Hartley's great novel The Go-Between) forms the emotional fulcrum of the picture. Paquin has gone onto a fine and distinguished career since, including her work in the X-Men films, but nothing has quite equalled the sophistication and sadness of her performance here.
9. Natalie Portman, Léon, 1994
Like Bale and Foster, Natalie Portman's status as an A-list star is unlikely ever to be challenged, which makes her first on-screen appearance in Luc Besson's classic thriller all the more fascinating. Playing Mathilda, the only surviving member of a family wiped out by Gary Oldman's deranged and corrupt DEA agent, Portman forms a bond with loner hitman Léon (Jean Reno), who, initially reluctantly, agrees to help her take revenge on Stansfield and his cohorts.
The queasy undertones of the relationship between the two – made more explicit in the extended director's cut, in which Mathilda unsuccessfully asks Léon to take her virginity – are difficult to take, but Portman's careful, nuanced and very moving work is a clear indication of where her hugely distinguished career would later go. And managing to hold one's own against Reno, at his most laconic, and Oldman, at his most manic, is quite the accomplishment, too.
10. Victoire Thivisol, Ponette, 1996
Of all the films on this list, Ponette will probably be the least familiar to readers, despite being a much-acclaimed, award-winning French picture that is regarded as one of the most accomplished films of the Nineties. Particular attention went to Victoire Thivisol's performance as the eponymous Ponette, a four-year old child who is unable either to comprehend or to move past the death of her mother in a car crash.
It might be thought almost impossible to elicit any kind of performance from a four-year old – and Thivisol is by far the youngest actor on this list – but nonetheless she manages to convey a wide spectrum of emotions and feelings that makes this a particularly heartbreaking film to watch. Credit must of course go to writer-director Jacques Doillon – who has subsequently been accused of impropriety by some of the actresses who appeared in his films – but it is Thivisol's fascinating work here that will endure.
11. Haley Joel Osment, The Sixth Sense, 1999
'I see dead people…they don't know they're dead.' Extraordinary, really, to see how M. Night Shyamalan's masterly chiller hid its biggest twist in plain sight, and equally extraordinary to see how its supremely accomplished child star Haley Joel Osment so elegantly and affectingly conveyed the turmoil of being besieged by spectral apparitions. Osment was already an accomplished child actor when Shyamalan cast him in the film – he was Forrest Gump's son, for instance – but the 10-year old offers a performance entirely devoid of any kind of cutesiness or affectation, instead being, by turns, frightening, frightened and lonely.
Osment was nominated for an Oscar, which he should have won, but instead the pointlessly sentimental Academy gave the award to Michael Caine for his pointlessly sentimental work in The Cider House Rules. Caine at least had the good grace to say, as he accepted the trophy, 'Haley Osment, what an astonishing…when I saw you, I thought, that's me out of it.' Strangely, Osment never went onto anything as big since. A self-parodying supporting role in the excellent The Kominsky Method may be his highest-profile part since.
12. Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine, 2006
Many of the roles on this list – whether intentionally or otherwise – flirt with the idea that their young stars are being exploited in some way for the audience's delectation, or horror. But only one had the chutzpah to make that potential exploitation its truly riotous centrepiece. The family relationship comedy-drama Little Miss Sunshine feels for much of its length like a standard-issue mid 2000s independent picture, with its too-quirky characters (Steve Carell's depressed, gay Proust scholar) feeling more like ideas than real people.
Yet Alan Arkin's riotous, Oscar-winning performance as a debauched pensioner, who takes his granddaughter Olive under his wing en route to the eponymous California beauty pageant in which she is appearing, is more than matched by the 10-year old Abigail Breslin as Olive. The film initially invites its viewers to feel appalled at the premature sexualisation of the pre-teen girls at the pageant, and then, with a brilliant, hilarious coup de cinema, turns these ideas completely on their head with a sequence in which Olive, tutored by her now dead grandfather, performs an outrageous striptease that shows up the whole tawdry affair for the grotesque charade it is. Breslin was Oscar-nominated, and probably should have won; she lost to Jennifer Hudson's mighty singing in Dreamgirls.
13. Saoirse Ronan, Atonement, 2007
So established is Saoirse Ronan as one of the most interesting and intelligent actresses working today that it's almost a shock to realise that her breakthrough role in Joe Wright's Ian McEwan adaptation Atonement was released in cinemas less than two decades ago. Ronan's character Briony dominates the film's stronger first half, in which she (like Paquin's Flora in The Piano) becomes inadvertently involved in a grown-up love affair, in this instance between Keira Knightley's haughty aristocrat Cecilia and the working-class Cambridge graduate Robbie (James McAvoy).
Ronan beautifully conveys a combination of malice, uncomprehending shock at the thoroughly grown-up passions that she is witness to and burgeoning personal awakening. It says a vast amount for her brilliant, Oscar-nominated performance that you are deeply disappointed when she vanishes, replaced by Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave as the older incarnations of the character.
14. Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild, 2012
If you were disappointed by the anodyne recent version of the evergreen musical classic Annie, then at least you may have enjoyed its star Quvenzhané Wallis, who projected a sorely needed energy and grit that the rest of the film lacked. Wallis was far better used in the fantastical 2012 picture Beasts of the Southern Wild, in which she played the six-year old Hushpuppy, who comes to believe that she is living amongst giant prehistoric animals, named aurochs.
Wallis – who was cast for her ability to read convincingly, scream mightily and burp on command – is entirely convincing in a challenging and difficult role, and was rewarded by being the youngest performer ever to have been nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars, at the age of nine. As the New York Times film critic A O Scott said of Wallis, '[she] has a smile to charm fish out of the water and a scowl so fierce it can stop monsters in their tracks.' Both are used mightily throughout this modern-day classic.
15. Jude Hill, Belfast, 2021
Although Kenneth Branagh isn't usually rated alongside Spielberg as a director of children, he's always excelled at getting top-notch performances from his young stars. There's a youthful Christian Bale in his 1989 Henry V for instance, and even his flop Artemis Fowl had a hugely likeable appearance by Ferdia Shaw in the title role. Yet it is in Branagh's autobiographical, black and white drama Belfast that he elicits his finest work from the youthful Jude Hill, playing the nine-year old version of the writer-director, named Buddy in this picture.
Although the film is set against the backdrop of The Troubles, it is a cheerful and vivacious picture, rather than a depressing and dour one, and Hill's charming, optimistic performance sets the tone for the richness of the on-screen bildungsroman that is depicted here. Hill was nominated for, and won, countless awards for his appearance here. Still only 14, and quietly building an impressive and eclectic career, he is a young actor who is undoubtedly worth watching.
Honourable mentions