When Tommy Kirk died last September, a lot of younger moviegoers, if they reacted to the news at all, probably said, "Tommy who?"
Kirk was 79. He'd been a child star at Disney in the '50s and '60s. He was on "The Mickey Mouse Club" and he was the kid in "Old Yeller" and he costarred with Fred MacMurray in the "Shaggy Dog" and "Flubber" movies, and he made a couple of beach-party movies and a couple of low-budget horrors, before kind of fading away.
He got canned at Disney eventually. Kirk claimed it was because he was gay and that Uncle Walt personally fired him.
With room for variations, it's a familiar story. The transition from child star to adult with a movie career can be tricky. A few actors make it. A lot of them don't.
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland survived the Golden Age at MGM and went on to up-and-down lives and careers. (Rooney, who made his first screen appearance at age six and his last in his 90s, probably holds the record for career longevity.) By contrast, their contemporaries, Freddie Bartholomew and Deanna Durbin, were both out of the business by the time they turned 30.
Jackie Coogan (1921's "The Kid") and Jackie Cooper (1931's "The Champ") both found success years later on television.
Dean Stockwell, a child star in the '40s, had an enduring career as a character actor.
Brandon De Wilde, the kid who begged Alan Ladd to come back in "Shane" (1953) came back to play Paul Newman's nephew in "Hud" (1963). Tim Considine, another Disney star, was the battle-damaged soldier George C. Scott slapped in "Patton"(1970). Jackie Earle Haley, who played one of the "Bad News Bears" in 1976 and one of the townies in "Breaking Away" (1979), returned as a child molester in "Little Children" (2006) and Rorschach in "Watchmen" (2009).
Juliette Lewis (Nick Nolte's daughter in "Cape Fear") and Christina Ricci (Wednesday in "The Addams Family") have found steady work in TV and indie films.
Natalie Portman (the aspiring young assassin in "The Professional"), Kristen Stewart (Jodie Foster's daughter in "Panic Room") and Saoirse Ronan (the girl who would someday be Vanessa Redgrave in "Atonement") have all moved on to adult stardom.
Of all of them, Foster has had the most wide-ranging career. On camera from the time she could walk and scary smart, she played a prostitute at 13 in "Taxi Driver" (1976), took time off to go to Yale, won a couple of Oscars, and went on to direct. Like some of the others, she could be around a long time yet, and her career is an ongoing work in progress.
Those are some of the juvenile performers who more or less managed the challenge of working beyond adolescence. Others (a lot of them) retired to non-acting lives. A few (like Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer) ran into serious real-life trouble.
The pigeon-hole effect is a factor in all this. Become too successful in a certain kind of role (like a kid playing a kid) and it's hard for casting directors to see you as anything else. Child actors grow up at their peril. And they all grow up.
In a profession notorious for its uncertainty, it's not enough to be good. You've got to persist, even as your voice changes and certain physical features evolve in noticeable ways. And it doesn't hurt to be lucky.
