In most cases, child actors face an occupational hazard in making movies. Not only do many screenwriters struggle to write believable children, making them too cute or cloying or beyond their years, but children themselves often fail to feel natural on screen. More often than not, viewers enjoy movies despite the kids in them.
However, a few kid actors have managed to feel natural and part of the movie in a way that outdoes even adults. These child actors fit right in with the rest of their movies, accentuating the cinematic experience.
Sometimes, the kids feel real, as if they’re not acting at all. At other times, the kids match their movies’ tones, going big with the rest of the cast. In every case, these young performers turn in outstanding work before they even turn 18.
1. Judy Garland – The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The Wizard of Oz still dazzles to this day, thanks to its wonderful character designs and the still mind-blowing sequence in which Kansas girl Dorothy Gale walks out of her sepia-toned house and into the colorful world of Oz. However, the greatest effect remains Judy Garland, whose multi-faceted take on teen Dorothy Gale grounds the fantasy adventure.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Garland had already done work on stage and screen before starring in The Wizard of Oz as a teenager. As Dorothy, she manages to run the gamut of emotions, pleading with sorrow for her lost aunt, standing up to the Lion and the Wicked Witch, and, most of all, showing empathy to everyone she meets. And that does not even mention her performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one of the most defining songs in cinema history.,
2. Kirsten Dunst – Interview With the Vampire (1994)
It’s hard to talk about Kirsten Dunst’s career without mentioning her outstanding adult work, which seems to get more complex and impressive every year. While some might dismiss her early work in the teen comedy Bring ItOn or the Spider-Man films as a training period, Dunst started out as a complex actor with the 1994 Neil Jordan movie Interview with the Vampire.
Written by Anne Rice, adapting her own novel, Interview With the Vampire digs into the secret world of eternal bloodsuckers, the primary group played by Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas. Dunst plays Claudia, a child who gets turned to vampirism by Cruise’s Lestat. The role requires Dunst to portray someone decades older than she appears, which she somehow pulls off with grace and energy.
3. Hailee Steinfeld – True Grit (2010)
Not everyone can deliver the Coen Brothers’ style of dialogue, not even when the idiosyncratic duo adapts the language of the Charles Portis novel True Grit. At just thirteen years old, Hailee Steinfeld doesn’t just handle the Coens’ lines. She makes them sing.
Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross, a tough and aggrieved girl who hires the drunkard Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to find the man who killed her father. Where Kim Darby played Mattie as a spoiled adult in the 1969 True Grit with John Wayne, Steinfeld feels like an actual child within the heightened reality that the Coens constructed.
4. Tatum O’Neal – Paper Moon (1973)
To anyone who doesn’t know the history of actor Ryan O'Neal, it might seem that Tatum had an unfair advantage by acting alongside her father in Paper Moon. Rather, quite the opposite happened, as Tatum showed outstanding acting skills playing Addie, a cute kid who becomes part of con man Moze Pray’s (Ryan O'Neal) act.
Paper Moon comes from director Peter Bogdanovich and writer Alvin Sargent, who adapts the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown. Moze may use Addie as a cheap ploy to garner sympathy, but Tatum plays the character with genuine depth and realism. It’s no wonder that she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the youngest competitive winner to date.
5. Alex R. Hibbert – Moonlight (2016)
Among the many remarkable things about the Academy Award-winning drama Moonlight was that its three primary actors did not plan their performances together. Director Barry Jenkins allowed Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes to come up with their own takes on protagonist Chiron, whom they portray at different points in life. Yet, the three feel coherent, all aspects of a kid figuring himself out.
Hibbert plays the youngest version of Chiron, a boy not sure he can articulate why he feels different from the other kids. Hibbert somehow strikes a perfect balance between guarding himself from bullies and opening himself in the rare moments when he feels safe. Even as a kid, Hibbert embodies the depths implied in Jenkins’ screenplay and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s story.
6. Bobby Anderson – It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Ask any film fan about George Bailey and they’ll describe Jimmy Stewart, the lovable everyman at the center of the holiday classic. But Stewart is just one of two people who make Bailey the quintessential relatable hero. The other is Bobby Anderson, who portrays the ambitious pre-adolescent George at the start of the movie.
For most of his scenes, It’s a Wonderful Life just asks Anderson to play a kid, cheering along his kid brother while sledding and fending off flirtations from icky girls. But when the grief-stricken chemist Mr. Gower (H. B. Warner) realizes that George saved him by switching up a mistaken order, Anderson gets to play real depth, the principles of a grown-up coming through the cries of a boy.
7. Jacob Tremblay – Doctor Sleep (2019)
Kids always make for a fraught proposition in horror movies. The right kid can add creepiness to a story, but more often than not their distractions or victims. Kids seldom get to do the most upsetting part of a horror film, but Jacob Tremblay embraces the moment in Doctor Sleep, the Stephen King adaptation written and directed by Mike Flanagan.
Tremblay plays a minor character in Doctor Sleep, a kid whose prescience makes him a good ball player and a target for the evil True Knot, led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). The Knot lures him to a field where they kill him and devour his essence. Tremblay throws himself into the part, screaming and wailing and begging with an intensity that not only upsets the audience but also his fellow performers.
8. Anna Paquin – The Piano (1993)
Tatum O'Neal is the youngest person to win the Academy Award, having done so at age ten. Anna Paquin became the second-youngest winner when she took home Best Supporting Actress for The Piano, written and directed by Jane Campion.
Paquin plays Flora, the daughter of mute Scotswoman Aida (Holly Hunter, who won Best Actress). When Aida gets sold into marriage to New Zealander Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), Flora takes the role of interpreter for her mother. As the sole form of communication between Aida and other adults, Flora carries a wisdom beyond her years, brought to life by Paquin.
9. Catinca Untaru – The Fall (2006)
Catinca Untaru feels like a bit of a cheat on this list. Not because she isn’t great in The Fall as Alexandria, a kid who befriends the injured stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace). Rather, she’s an iffy addition because Untaru didn’t realize she was acting. Instead, director Tarsem hid the camera and just let Pace tell her stories, recording her delighted reactions.
Whatever one thinks of the approach, it resulted in one of the most delightful and natural screen appearances of all time. As Roy tells his fantastic story, brought to life through Tarsem's wonderful visuals, he tries to get Alexandria to bring him more morphine. The interplay between the two adds grace to tough moments within an otherwise beautiful work.
10. Jodie Foster – Taxi Driver (1976)
After playing a minor role in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Jodie Foster broke out big-time in his next film, Taxi Driver. At just 12 years old, Foster garnered a Best Supporting Actress nomination for playing street kid Iris Steensman, the first of many awards she’d gathered throughout her impressive career.
A lazier creative team than Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader would have cast a 12-year-old as a streetwalker for mere shock value. In Taxi Driver, Iris both complicates the simple morality of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) and lets Foster demonstrate her already impressive skills, playing a child forced to act like an adult.
11. Haley Joel Osment – The Sixth Sense (1999)
In many cases, the performer doesn’t deserve full blame for a bad kid character. Equal fault goes to the screenwriter and director, who treat the character as just a smaller adult. The Sixth Sense succeeds because it understands Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) as someone plagued by the dead people he sees, but still a kid.
M. Night Shyamalan builds the most effective scenes when he lets Osment play Cole as a little boy experiencing things that defy explanation. When Cole lies about the ghosts to comfort his mother or plays with his toys in a church, he makes sense of the visions not as a grown-up would, nor as would a too-wise child. Rather, he’s just being a kid.
12. Mickey Rooney – Boys Town (1938)
The most shocking thing about Mickey Rooney isn’t that he was the first teenager to get an Academy Award nomination when he earned a Best Actor nod for 1939’s Babes in Arms. It’s that he was, at age 19 at the time, already an industry vet. Rooney had appeared on screen since the age of six and had over two dozen credits before Babes in Arms.
But it was his preceding film Boys Town from 1938 that found Rooney at his best. Directed by Norman Taurog and written by John Meehan and Dore Schary, Boys Town tells the true story of Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy) who runs a home for abandoned boys. Rooney goes big and broad to play troublemaker Whitey, which might strike some as too cartoonish. However, Rooney’s mugging works for Whitey, making the character a kid who tries too hard to get the respect he wants.
13. Quvenzhané Wallis – Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Based on the novel Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar, who co-wrote the script with director Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild takes a magical realism look at the Louisiana Bayou, an area still at the front of the American consciousness after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Mixing fantasy with such a real and troubled area could have blown up in the face of Zeitlin and Alibar without the irresistible performance of Quvenzhané Wallis.
Wallis won the part of Hushpuppy when she was five years old, and retained her youthful energy all through the shoot. Even when the movie goes too hard into moralizing, Wallis makes Hushpuppy feel like a true child, the one thing audiences can latch onto in an otherwise uncanny world.
14. Patty McCormack – The Bad Seed (1956)
At the end of The Bad Seed, the voice-over announces the names of stars Patty McCormack, who plays Rhoda Penmark, and Nancy Kelly, as Rhoda’s mother Christine. The stars take a curtain call, something common in theater but almost nonexistent in film, and then Kelly puts McCormack on her knee and mocks paddling the child, punishing the actress for her character’s bad behavior.
This odd ending came at the behest of studio Warner Bros., who worried about the audience’s reaction to The Bad Seed. Based on the novel by William March and the play by William Andersen, The Bad Seed follows Christine’s growing suspicion that her daughter is a serial killer. Director Mervyn LeRoy and screenwriter John Lee Mahin wouldn’t have to worry about offending anyone with such an outlandish premise had McCormack not been so convincing.
15. Shirley Temple – Curly Top (1935)
Even today, Shirley Temple remains the quintessential child star. Neither time, changing acting styles, nor the casual racism in films of the era has diminished her persona as a guileless kid.
The key to Temple’s success can be found in Curly Top, directed by Irving Cummings and written by Patterson Mcnu*tt and Arthur J. Beckhard, based on the novel Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. Cummings leans into the melodrama of orphan Elizabeth (Temple) and the unbelievable farce of the romance between adults Morgan (John Boles) and Mary (Rochelle Hudson). But as soon as Temple sings “Animal Crackers in My Soup,” her effortless charm lightens the film and lets it float along.
16. Drew Barrymore – E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
A scion of a legendary acting family, Drew Barrymore already had great expectations hoisted upon her made her film debut with a minor part in Altered States. With her second movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Barrymore proved that she had a natural gift for acting, even as a kid.
As Gertie Taylor, little sister to E.T.’s best human bud Elliott (Henry Thomas), Barrymore maintained the wonder of director Steven Spielberg’s film, even after the two main characters formed a bond. Her guilelessness on screen captured the sweetness of writer Melissa Mathison’s story, speaking for every kid in the audience who wanted, but could never have, an alien pal.
17. Dakota Fanning – Coraline (2009)
The older of two fantastic acting siblings, Dakota got saddled with some terrible movies, which relied on her preternatural presence to overcome a schmaltzy script. She didn’t get a full chance to show off her talents until landing a voice role as the title character in Coraline, the stop motion movie by Henry Selick, based on the novella by Neil Gaiman.
Coraline Jones is a normal kid who doesn’t understand why her pre-occupied writer parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) don’t cater to her every whim. When she visits a magical version of her world, Coraline becomes enchanted with the more attentive Other Mother, at least until she suspects devious intentions. Neither angel nor demon, Fanning lets Coraline be a real kid, selfish, sweet, and everything in between.
18. Lina Leandersson – Let The Right One In (2008)
In some ways, Lina Leandersson’s character Eli from the Swedish film Let the Right One In covers a lot of the same ground as Claudia from Interview With the Vampire. Like Claudia, Eli became a vampire as a child and thus feels the weight of years on her seemingly young body. However, unlike Claudia, director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapts his own novel, go for a very different tone with their child-like immortal.
Let the Right One In offers a meditation on bullying and child cruelty, following solitary child Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant). Oskar and Eli form a friendship despite the warning signs around her, including the suffering of her adult familiar Håkan (Per Ragnar). In both its promise and its danger, the friendship between Eli and Oskar illustrates all the forces that rob children of their innocence, supernatural or otherwise.
19. Elizabeth Taylor – National Velvet (1944)
Before she became a big-screen star and a tabloid mainstay, Elizabeth Taylor was just a child actor. Taylor started appearing in films as a ten-year-old and 1942 and caught viewers’ attention with her ethereal presence. Even when her acting chops underwhelmed, Taylor fit right in among the angelic beauties of classic Hollywood.
Those striking features are on full display in her first major role, playing the teen horse girl Velvet Brown, alongside former kid actor Mickey Rooney, in National Velvet. Director Clarence Brown and writer Helen Deutsch go for big emotional swings in National Velvet, based on the 1935 novel by Enid Bagnold. But Taylor brings a sweetness that cuts the weight of the melodrama, playing along the top of each dramatic beat.
20. Natalie Wood – Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Natalie Wood would go on to have a remarkable career as a teen and adult, until her tragic death at the age of 43. At 17 years old, Wood earned her first Academy Award nomination as love interest Judy in Rebel Without a Cause. But one can see her talents at their purest in her first co-lead as Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street, written and directed by George Seaton.
True, Wood benefits from a great set of co-stars, including Maureen O’Hara as mother Doris, John Payne as neighbor Fred, and especially Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle, one of the all-time greatest screen Santas. But Wood holds her own with every scene partner, keeping things as light and innocent as Santa would want.
