Jackie Cooper was an excellent child actor, doing an outstanding job in the original Treasure Island with Wallace Beery.
Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcy as two members of the Dead End Kids. They were probably teens at that point.
Spanky and Our Gang members were all pretty good.
Shirley Temple was the world’s darling when she was little, and very mature for her age.
Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney made a lot of teen films together and both were good actors.
I was so in love with her growing up. And you can see her naked butt in the movie The Family Way (as an adult you pervs).
Patty Duke was also quite good playing identical cousins Cathy and Patty Lane. From what I’ve read, her debut in The Miracle Worker blew the critics away.
I thought young Christian Bale was pretty amazing in Empire of the Sun. I’m also impressed with how Kiernan Shipka has grown as an actress. However, her co-star and on-camera boyfriend, Marten Weiner (creator/director Matt Weiner’s son), is one of the worst actors, child or adult, that I’ve ever witnessed. They should just roll a mannequin into frame and have someone off-camera read his lines; it would be a more emotional scene.
Angus Jones in 2.5 Men had good comic timing (or direction) when he was little. He might still be okay, but they’ve made the character too dumb to live.
Roseanne’s son wasn’t very good but they never focused an episode on him, so he was easy to ignore. Darlene (Sara Gilbert) was awesome but she wasn’t acting – that’s her personality. The first Becky wasn’t too bad, the second Becky (Sarah Chalke) quite good.
The little girl in Forbidden Games is the best I’ve ever seen in a movie, and there’s another French movie – forgot the title – starring a four-year-old whose mother dies. The title of the movie is the little girl’s name. Anyone know it? Oh, and the boys in 400 Blows. Maybe bad acting is difficult to notice when I’m reading subtitles, but I’ve never seen a bad child actor in a non-English movie.
Bran in Game of Thrones is quite good.
Unfortunately saddled with playing against that Weiner kid sometimes who is pretty dire.
Edit: I see corkboard beat me to it but it needs to be restated anyway.
Freddie Highmore was an adorable Charlie Bucket and also held his own pretty well with more serious subjects in Finding Neverland.
Jake Lloyd
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His acting in “The Phantom Menace” was so wooden, some people called him “Mannequin Skywalker.” He wasn’t too bad in “Jingle All the Way,” though.
Natalie Portman was great in Leon: The Professional.
Anna Paquin won an Oscar at age 11 for The Piano, and was also very good in Fly Away Home.
From the previews, the kids in Parental Guidance suck ass.
I had to look up his name, but I remember being blown away by Huckleberry Fox, who played the younger son in Terms of Endearment. I see that he is no longer in the biz but has become an agricultural researcher. Awesome!
Another vote for Manny from Modern Family as the worst. I cringe watching him butcher his great lines. The other kid his age blows him out of the water.
Older TV, the two kids from the Twilight Zone episode “The Bewitching Pool” made it completely unwatchable.
I liked Max Pirkis in “Master and Commander” and “Rome”.
Growing up, I liked Rusty Hamer in “Make Room for Daddy”. Unfortunately, he didn’t have success as an adult and committed suicide at age 42.
I’ll nominate Hunter Carson as the worst child actor I can remember seeing, for his role in the remake of “Invaders from Mars” (1986). I kept thinking, while watching this movie, that this kid must be related to one of the producers, or that somebody involved in the production of the remake owed someone else a favor and this role was it.
Jackie Coogan was great in Chaplin’s The Kid. You’d never guess from watching it that he’d grow up to be Uncle Fester.
I agree with the Barone twins being the worst actors ever. Forehead girl from Night of the Hunter was pretty bad, too.
That’s assuming that they weren’t supposed to act like that. They were acting a lot like real kids. I wonder if they intended to have twins on the show or just hired twins to share the workload and decided to put them both on.
Anyone mentioned Tatum O’Neil in Paper Moon yet? She was never remotely as engaging in anything she has done since, but that one at least was a strong performance.
To be fair, I think that comes down as much to the writing as anything else. They were aggressively going for sickly sweet, which I guess worked then but tends to be a bit much for jaded modern audiences. At least if they’re not in the mood for nostalgia.
By contrast some kudos to Natalie Wood, who deserves her plaudits in Miracle on 34th Street. But again by writing her as precocious and a bit cynical ( but not unrealistically so ) I think it echoes modern sensibilities a bit more. So when we get the sweet fantasy ending it still resonates without becoming too syrupy.
Honestly I haven’t seen her in much except in that remake of War of the Worlds where I mostly remember her repeated high-pitched shriek :D.
But I thought her little sister Elle was pretty decent in Super 8.
John Adames in Gloria baffles me. Was John Cassevettes’ compounding the futility of Gena Rowland’s efforts to save this kid from the mob by making him so richly deserving of death?
Danny Lloyd was great in The Shining.
AFAIK, they needed twins to echo Ray’s real life. They got the job because they knew somebody on the show- their sister, who actually can act (American Splendor).