I really couldn’t have identified Dakota Fanning until I saw her in Push. She was very good in that one.
All in all, I don’t think many child actors are acting so much as performing. It’s just their regular personality, reading the lines they’ve been given. That has a lot to do with why so few child actors succeed as adults. While most adult actors aren’t much different, they still need a broader range. Child actors are usually only asked to portray situations that they’d already be familiar with in life.
Some of the ones mentioned here are clear exceptions. I’ve heard that Ron Howard, even when very young, took his acting seriously and worked with the cast and crew to improve his scenes. Patty Duke in the Miracle Worker was a tough role in some ways. It could have been played by a timid, inactive child, but she did well in portraying a young woman locked in darkness and silence.
Lily, from Modern Family, is the worst part of the show, IMO: although she’s not especially bad for a kid her age, the way they use her is really bad. She says her oh-so-cute lines in a nervous monotone and then marches off-screen. It always makes me cringe when she comes on.
The best? Not to be all hipster, but you’ve probably never heard of her (heh heh): Catinka Untaru from The Fall. Apparently the director never actually showed her the script and basically just sent her out with the professional actors to play-act in front of the cameras, responding to their scripted lines to create this totally mesmerizing improv, and the director actually changed some of the film’s visual images to respond to her thoughts. The movie itself is a little bit of a mess, but her performance is captivating.
OK, as worst…This is easy. I was of the generation that saw Dondi staring child actor David Kory. Even as a young child myself, I could tell he was so bad it stunk. Take the most irritating child actor. Give him the most irritating voice imaginable. Have him do a bad Italian accent. Now, dress him in large adult army uniforms, in the theory that small children dressed in adult clothes are incredibly cute. Now, give him a a script that people would go into diabetic shock because there was so much added sugar. That was Dondi.
Now for best. I considered Liz Taylor. She was transfixing as a child actor. You would watch her and be hypnotized. But I’m not sure it was her acting. I don’t know what it was, but I don’t think it was her acting. I thought about Jodie Foster, but some part of me never believed she was a child. It was like it was a small adult. She she doesn’t get my vote… It finally came down to Tatum O’Neal. And while I can only think of a couple of movies she did, she carried it off well. In Paper Moon, it worked. Yes, Yes, I know, she was playing Ryan O’Neal’s daughter. It was hardly a stretch. Still, it worked.
That’s right; she was in both the Broadway play and the feature film.
Leonard DiCaprio’s performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? was another tour de force. I had watched three-quarters of the movie before I realized it was him!
A lot of people are very negative about Dakota Fanning, although she seems like a serviceable actress to me.
But let me tell you here and now her little sister Elle can act her sister right out of the room. In “Super 8” she was just astounding. The girl’s going to make people forget her sister.
But better still than either Fanning is Hailee Steinfeld, of “True Grit” fame. She was so amazing in that movie that it’s easy to remember she was only 13 years old when they filmed it. She was in a movie with Jeff Daniels, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin all putting in fantastic performances, and she outacted them all.
Going back a ways, people forget Kurt Russell was a child actor. He was a damned good one, too.
I rather liked the two young people who played Jem and Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird. Neither Phillip Alford or Mary Badham did a whole lot of other acting but they were good in that film.
I did see Alford, slightly older, in the film Shenendoah, with Jimmy Stewart. but his part was not a large one. Still not too bad.
Oddly enough, Mary Badham is also the hated child actress in the Twilight Zone episode mentioned earlier.
I’ve only seen her in one other thing. She had a small part in This Property Is Condemned with Robert Redford & Natalie Wood. It was interesting to see her as a teenager.
For people who are posting that it’s not acting if you are ‘playing yourself’, I disagree.
I remember when I was a kid, I took drama in my town’s middle school for the arts. Before our plays, we used to do these little skits to warm up the crowd. These skits almost always were about middle school kids, sitting around doing regular middle school stuff…just ‘being ourselves’.
We found that kind of hard, actually. It was much easier for me to sink my teeth into Rizzo from Grease or the witch from the Wizard of Oz. (not that I often got parts that big).
Acting ‘yourself’ is still acting. You still have to be able to be natural in front of a camera, and that is acting. In my opinion.
By the way, other posters reminded me of Roseann’s kids. Yes, they were great. I thought D.J. was great too, and he definitely did have some story lines that featured him. And the first Becky was THE Becky. She did great.
In my post I was just distinquishing between two forms of acting. And I mentioned not many adult actors are able to reach past their own personality either. It’s not a put-down. Only a few actors, adult or child, can do a good job transforming themselves in a role.
