AMC recently added to its lineup the 1987 vampire movie The Lost Boys, a cut above the typical comedy-horror movie thanks to a strong script and a superb cast. The A-List adults—Dianne Wiest, Barnard Hughes, Edward Hermann—join an extraordinary company of young actors, including Jami Gertz, Alex Winter (who two years later would join Keanu Reeves in the title roles of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), Jason Patric, and Kiefer Sutherland, just at the outset of his career as a malevolent young vampire. Corey Feldman has a major role that was among his last before he fell into the sickness of chemical dependency. But the actor who breaks my heart is Corey Haim, who plays the lead, the kid who is trying to save his older brother from turning into a creature of the night. A couple of weeks ago I watched the movie for the first time since 1987, and I was both astonished and saddened to confirm my memory of what a fine performance Haim gave, how much talent he had, what a future might have awaited him. But he died before he reached 40 years old, burned out, short-circuited, fried on drugs and alcohol, destroyed by his addictions and by a Hollywood system that too frequently leaves young talent to fend for itself.
So many former child actors have succeeded in Hollywood that the casual observer might mistakenly conclude that landing a role on the Disney Channel or a network sitcom as a kid is a guarantee of stardom by age 35. And I say good for Jason Bateman, Jeff Bridges, Ryan Gosling, Keke Palmer, Daniel Radcliffe, Keri Russell, Brooke Shields, Zendaya, and others who have managed to find considerable success as adults in a tough business. But their arrival at their current status is something of a miracle. There are four general outcomes for child stars. Tier One belongs to those listed above and the likes of Ron Howard, Jodi Foster, Tom Holland, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who had sufficient adult guidance to make the transition more or less seamlessly from childhood to adulthood in front of the camera. (In Howard’s case, also behind the camera.) Maybe the most famous example is Mickey Rooney, who lived into his 90’s, made his first movie in 1926 during the silent era, and made his last in 2021. Tier Two includes people like Drew Barrymore, Zac Efron, and Haley Joel Osment, who survived challenges—depression, alcoholism, drugs, for examples—and who stumbled while processing all the fame and attention that came so early in their lives before they steadied themselves. Tier Three features those who tried the business and then walked away from it, like Phillip Alford and Mary Badham, who played Jem and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and then, after trying another couple of roles, retired from acting. Tier Four, the saddest, comprises the kids who got chewed up and are now dead (Haim, Brad Renfro, River Phoenix, Gary Coleman) or are still wrestling with their demons (Lindsay Lohan, Macauley Culkin, and Feldman). Judy Garland, whose career was the inverse of that of her old friend Mickey Rooney, represents Tier Four most wrenchingly: the multi-talented woman whose movies still play constantly on television and who died sadly at age 47. At her funeral Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow opposite her in The Wizard of Oz, declared that “she just plain wore out.”
Most recently I’ve been watching Audrey Hepburn, who at age 24 was no child when she starred in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina from 1954, but she plays one quite convincingly in the first part of the movie, and as we watch, we feel that complex mixture of awe at her youth and beauty, joy in knowing the smashing career she was going to enjoy, and sadness at the prospect of her painful death from cancer at age 53. That’s what happens when we revisit Judy Garland as Dorothy or River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones. For every kick we get out of seeing little Ronny Howard as Opie and knowing that he’s going to become an Oscar-winning director, married to his childhood sweetheart, father of Dallas Bryce Howard, we get the shock of seeing Corey Haim in The Lost Boys, the movie that launched a career for Kiefer Sutherland and sadly marked the apex of Corey Haim’s professional life. John Keats was way ahead of me when he wrote his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” wherein he muses on the image of two lovers depicted on the side of the urn; they are poised to kiss, and they will forever be preserved as young and beautiful and always ecstatic over the intimacy about to come. Yet they will never complete the kiss, never get to consummate their love. So is it better to be frozen in one ecstatic moment of eternal youth, or better to live a dynamic life of mutability and risk? In the case of these actors, whose faces are preserved, Grecian-urn-like, on film, we celebrate the moments they enjoy forever in each movie frame and dread what’s coming for them when the pictures wrap.