TIMES
ONLINEJuly 28, 2005
Screen
The Fame Factory
Freddie Highmore has every right to look pensive — child stardom often ends in adult obscurity, and worse. Sean Macaulay counts the casualties, and discovers what’s being done to help them
WITH the success of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the US ($100 million taken in two weeks), Freddie Highmore — the 12-year-old Charlie Bucket himself — has taken his latest step on the road to fame and all that goes with it.
Unfortunately, what has often gone with child stardom is adult self-destruction. The latest casualty is Danny Bonaduce, once of The Partridge Family, who was fired from his job as a LA radio host last month after yet another trip to rehab (he had previously hit the headlines for hitting a transvestite in Miami).
Freddie and the other child stars of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory can take some comfort from the happy fates that befell the cast members of the 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie, is now happily working as a vet in upstate New York. Denise Nickerson, who played Violet Beauregarde, works as an accountant in Colorado, while Michael Bollner, who played Augustus Gloop, is a tax accountant in Germany.
They are the lucky, balanced few, though. Most child actors struggle to find meaningful lives as adults, especially if they attempt to stick with showbusiness after their looks and voice change. When the helpline phone rings at A Minor Consideration, the Los Angeles charity founded to help former child actors, three out of four calls are to do with problems of addiction and eating disorders.
It sounds like a joke: a charity dedicated to promoting the rights of out-of-control overgrown showbusiness brats. But Paul Petersen, a television star in the 1950s on The Donna Reed Show, founded the charity in 1990 after a series of former child actor suicides (Tim Hovey, Trent Lehman, Rusty Hamer).
"Being a child performer has lifelong consequences," he says. "Even more so in adolescence, when you most want your privacy to figure out who you are. This business lavishes great attention on children and turns its back on them when they’re no longer useful. It’s brutal. Any child actor will know that moment when someone says: ‘Didn’t you used to be?’ Or, worse: ‘Oh, I used to love you’."
The rise of "trainwreck" TV shows featuring former child stars, such as The Surreal Life, is felt to be a mixed blessing to the cause. On the one hand, the shows offer work and attention. On the other, they ensure that any performer’s identity will always be that of the former child star.
Brandon Cruz, who appeared in the Sixties sitcom, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, went on to a 20-year career as a punk singer, appearing with the Dead Kennedys and his own band, Dr Know. His tattooed surf-punk demeanour is a world away from his cute freckled childhood self, but he knows he will always be known as "former child star Brandon Cruz".
Cruz, who drifted into drugs as a teenager, has been sober for 10 years with the help of A Minor Consideration. "I can’t blame Hollywood for my drug and alcohol problems. I would have got into them anyway — I just got into them quicker because I finished high school early, thanks to the on-set tutor, and I had money to leave home at 15."
He credits his TV father, Bill Bixby, for steering him away from self-pity and towards a strong work ethic. "He’d say: ‘How many people were in front of the camera on our show?’ I said: ‘Two. Me and you.’ ‘And how many people were behind it?’ ‘About 80.’ ‘So you have to go where the work is.’ He told me to start as an assistant if I had to."
Cruz had to, and now also works as an editor.
The chief archivist of the adult child star phenomenon is Joal Ryan, the author of Former Child Stars: The Story of America’s Least Wanted. She started her website Former Child Star Central.com as a bit of fun, but it expanded into an information mecca for "where are they now" connoisseurs.
"Child stars are our virtual peers," she says. "They hold the same fascination as the people we went to school with. It’s only natural we want to see how they turned out. Who got rich. Who got fat or bald."
And, of course, who died of an overdose. Anissa Jones, a pigtailed cutie in the Sixties sitcom Family Affair, was the inaugural casualty of the modern child star era. Her overdose in 1976 at the age of 18 inspired the notion of a child star curse.
Diff’rent Strokes turned this notion into pop culture myth after all three of its child stars fell from grace. Todd Bridges suffered a string of arrests for violent drug-related incidents. Dana Plato was caught trying to rob a video store and later died of an overdose of painkillers. Gary Coleman, the poster boy of the genre (pictured above), was convicted of punching one of his own fans while working as a security guard. He also ran for Governor of California after two suicide attempts and a successful lawsuit against his own parents for mismanaging his fortune.
American law was changed in 2000 to protect child stars’ earnings, thanks in part to the campaigning of Petersen and A Minor Consideration. Now 15 per cent of a child’s income must be held in trust until he or she is 18. But this is only the first of many necessary steps, says Petersen. "Just as the final credits on a movie say, ‘No animals were hurt in the making of this film’, we want to see it say, ‘ No children were harmed’, too."
SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR CHILD STARS
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.