Issues of propriety have been raised about Harry Potterstar Daniel Radcliffe appearing naked on stage and 12-year-old Dakota Fanning playing a rape victim, writes Michael Dwyer.
Acting is regarded as the most difficult of all professions because so many actors are out of work at any given time. For child actors, there is the challenge of holding their audience and staying in demand after they reach their twenties. The failure rate has been dauntingly high.
In the past week there has been controversy on both sides of the Atlantic regarding the bold career decisions taken by two of today's most popular young movie stars.
In Hounddog, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Dakota Fanning, who is 12, plays a rape victim. Meanwhile in London, revealing publicity shots were issued, featuring star of the Harry Potterfilms Daniel Radcliffe, who is 17 and will have several frontal nude scenes in the stage revival of Equus, which opens there on February 27th.
Fanning, who turns 13 this month, made her debut in a Tide commercial when she was five, prompting her parents to move the family from Georgia to Los Angeles. She was signed for a succession of film and TV roles, securing leading roles opposite Sean Penn ( I Am Sam), Robert De Niro ( Hide and Seek) and Tom Cruise ( War of the Worlds). Her sister, Elle Fanning, who is eight, has already notched up a prolific output, including the Oscar-nominated Babel.
While Dakota Fanning stars in the sweet-natured children's film Charlotte's Web, which is released here next Friday, there has been an outcry in the US about director Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog, in which Fanning plays a 12-year-old rape victim, Lewellen.
"The big scene arrives nearly an hour in, as Lewellen is lured into a barn, tricked and raped," notes Varietycritic Todd McCarthy. "It's entirely clear what's going on, but Kampmeier handles it with finesse, keeping Lewellen off-screen most of the way, filling the soundtrack with her screaming. It's over relatively quickly, and when Lewellen is finally seen in the immediate aftermath, she looks drained of colour, her youth and innocence suddenly vanished." Not unusually, most of the people who have condemned the film have not seen it. However, several religious groups insisted that featuring a 12-year-old girl in a rape scene is in itself criminal, and much of the blame was levelled at her parents for allowing the scene.
"They were attacking my family and me, and that's where it got too far," Dakota Fanning responded in a statement. "Pretty much everybody who talked about it attacked my mother, which I did not appreciate. That was extremely uncalled for, and hurtful."
Meanwhile, parents of young Harry Potterfans have been condemning Daniel Radcliffe's decision to remove his glasses and everything else for Equus, in which he plays Alan Strang, a disturbed stable boy who has blinded horses with a metal spike. Peter Firth was 20 when he played the role in the original 1973 London stage production at the National Theatre, and he received a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for the 1977 film version.
The first four Harry Potterfilms have made more than a billion dollars in the US alone, and Radcliffe, at 17, is reported to be the wealthiest teenager in Britain, having made more than £20 million (€30 million) from starring in the series. His father is a literary agent from Northern Ireland and his mother is a casting agent.
Warner Bros, the Hollywood studio that has backed the franchise, is said to be nervous about Radcliffe's stage role in Equus, so soon before his return as the schoolboy wizard in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which opens at cinemas across the world in July.
"Daniel does not want to step away from Harry Potter," his spokeswoman, Vanessa Davies, said, "but he does want to show that he is a rounded actor capable of very different roles. He has tremendous support from Harry Potterfans."
In response to claims that many of those young fans would want to see Radcliffe in Equus, the play's producer, David Pugh, commented: " Equusis on the school syllabus and I would never stipulate what age people should be to see it. We will offer parental guidance and we will point out that some scenes in Equusare unsuitable for children. But there will not be a ban on them attending the performance." He added: "I saw the play at 14 and it changed my life. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't be producing it now."
BREAKING THE MOULDis a risk that many child actors have confronted before Radcliffe and Fanning, and with mixed results. Now 26, Macaulay Culkin was 10 when he became an international star in the first of the three hugely successful Home Alonecomedies. He disappeared from movies after he starred in Richie Rich(1994) and returned nine years later as a drug-taking hedonist and convicted murderer in Party Monster, which failed to revive his still-flagging career.
Drew Barrymore was 11 months old when she appeared in a dog food commercial and she was seven when she played Gertie, the little girl in ET, in 1982. She was drinking and snorting cocaine before she was in her teens and later posed nude for Playboy. Her film career continues to flourish as an actress and a producer.
In 1976, when she was 14, Jodie Foster, who started out in commercials when she was two, was seen in the popular children's musical Bugsy Malone- and as a pre-teen prostitute who is ostensibly tough yet vulnerable in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Foster went on to have a thriving film career, collecting two best actress Oscars, and emerging as a director in her own right.
Irish actor Hugh O'Conor was nine when he played a troubled child abducted by a Christian Brother (Liam Neeson) in the disturbing, quietly powerful film of Bernard MacLaverty's novel, Lamb. "I was exposed to many adult themes, but everyone treated me very considerately, and having my mum with me on the set helped a lot," O'Conor said this week from the Welsh set of Flick, a horror film in which he co-stars with Faye Dunaway.
Asked about Radcliffe's decision to bare all in Equus, O'Conor said: "It's quite a brave thing for him to do. I've seen the play and it's a very good play. His role is difficult, but he is a good actor and it will show his range. He's obviously doing it because he wants to do it. He certainly doesn't need the money."