Shots in the dark: why the slope from child to adult stardom has never been more slippery

Becoming a child or teen star can be a mixed blessing if there's no follow-through. The shift of pop culture's economic focus onto the youth audience over the past 15 or so years has put immense pressure on kid actors hoping to become adult stars. So fickle is the marketplace that talent and beauty are no guarantee of enduring popularity for most early overachievers; graft, tenacity, and bottomless charisma are crucial too.

Over the last year, I've enjoyed repeated family matinees of 1935's A Midsummer Night's Dream and 1937's Heidi. Fourteen-year-old Mickey Rooney's gurgling Puck in Dream is the uncanniest Shakespearean performance in cinema. In Heidi, 9-year-old Shirley Temple's Alpine orphan wins over her surly grandfather less through sweetness than determination, self-reliance, and cheek. Making it all look effortless, Temple was Hollywood's biggest moneymaker from 1935 to 1938; the profits her pictures earned kept 20th Century Fox afloat. For millions of Americans, she was a greater antidote to the Depression than the repeal of Prohibition.

Temple's boss, Darryl F. Zanuck, meticulously oversaw the films she made for him, and he strategized as long as he could to keep her hits coming, eventually cutting her loose at age 12 in 1940; she plodded gamely on through 1949 and hosted her own TV series in the '50s, but the clear second act in Temple's life was her ambassadorial career. Rooney, driven by some manic god of acting, remained a star at MGM until 1949, mixing electrifying performances with terrible ones thereafter. He hasn't quit yet.

So it would be a fallacy to suggest that, even if self-imposed, the onus on young stars to make the grade as adults is a modern phenomenon. Declining box-office revenues and intense media scrutiny, however, have intensified the emphasis on success like never before. Most of the current crop will quietly fade from view, though Scarlett Johansson--who holds a full hand of the five qualities mentioned above--is sure to be an A-lister for years, supposing she makes the right choices; her red-carpet glamour and aplomb (where did the tween from 1996's Manny & Lo acquire that?) has already turned her into Hollywood royalty. Who else will make the cut or at least stay employed? Aleisha Allen and Philip Bolden from Are We There Yet? The Fanning sisters? The Olsen twins? The Harry Potter gang? I'm putting my money on these four:

1. As the ferry girl in 2003's Cold Mountain, Jena Malone had only a few seconds to create an impression before she was shot by a sniper. Malone was so present in her single scene that her sudden absence conveyed the terrible poignancy of a vital life being snuffed out like a candle and the appalling arbitrariness of death in wartime. In the upcoming Pride & Prejudice, Malone steals every scene she's in as the giddy, hormonally stoked Lydia Bennet, whose foolishness is only matched by her selfishness. It will come as no surprise to anyone who saw Malone's shattering portrayal of the pleading 11-year-old rape victim in her debut, Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), that she is becoming an exceptional adult actress.

2. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, brilliant as the cocky, self-destructive teen hustler in the recent Mysterious Skin, looks more like William H. Bonney--a.k.a. Billy the Kid--than Johnny Depp or Tom Hanks. That hint of outlaw spirit could make him a latter-day counterculture icon. He is apparently superb in next spring's Brick.

3. Jamie Bell, the dance-crazy lad in Billy Elliot (2000), has northern English grit in him and an unsettling stare that could serve him well in December's King Kong. I didn't care for his Smike in Nicholas Nickleby (2002), but he was outstanding as the scrappy kid who escapes with his little brother from a psychotic uncle in hog-farm Georgia in last year's Undertow. Bell is sensibly restrained as a disaffected boy obsessed with a handgun in this month's arch urban Western Dear Wendy and reportedly excellent in The Chumscrubber. Not being an Adonis, or even a Jude Law, will make him more interesting over the long haul.

4. Evan Rachel Wood, who turns 18 this month, was revelatory as led-astray Tracy--so desperate for parental attention--in 2003's Thirteen. It was clear a future star had landed. But audiences who responded to the character's vulnerability may balk at Wood's U-turn in her new film, Pretty Persuasion, in which she excels as a smug, vicious 15-year-old Beverly Hills schoolgirl who sexually manipulates everyone around her. Surely it's not possible for someone so lovely to be so corrupt ... is it? The girl--the golden Wood--will prosper.

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