Child Actors

IN ROBERT Altman’s 1974 movie , three escaped convicts hole up for a few days with Mattie (Louise Fletcher), the sister-in-law of one of them, and we get a glimpse of what life is like in the depths of the Depression for a struggling working-class family whose breadwinner is waiting out a jail sentence. Mattie is a steady-going pragmatist who focuses on getting her husband paroled, keeping her mischievous little boy out of trouble, and “training” her daughter. You wouldn’t think she had a frivolous idea in her head, yet aside from domestic tasks Noel Joy’s training includes practicing tap steps every day in front of a foot mirror. The girl is overweight and shapeless and it’s obvious that the regimen affords her no pleasure. But the year is 1934, and beneath that hard-boiled proletarian mask Mattie must cherish the dream that Noel Joy might win a contest, land a Hollywood agent, and wind up like Shirley Temple, who had just attained celebrity with The child-actor phenomenon was invented by the movies. In the nineteenth century, stage acting was still mostly stylized, and audiences were willing to accept performers in roles both much younger and much older than their true ages, especially if they were stars. That impulse trailed somewhat into silent movies: Mary Pickford, the most popular movie actress of the Teens and Twenties, played little girls into her mid-thirties. But she was an exception; the mimetic nature of the motion picture made it best suitable for realism. Moviegoers went wild for seven-year-old Jackie Coogan in the title role of Charlie Chaplin’s (1921), an illegitimate child raised by The Little Tramp when the boy’s mother abandons