Child Actors Quotes

I credit my mom Debbie for creating a solid family base, ... She gave me a strong sense of reality so I could avoid falling into the normal pitfalls of child actors.

At the time I was growing up in the business I was very well established within the industry as a child actor and as I grew up and turned into a teenager there was less and less work.

I was never a child actor. I was a child performer.

It's difficult being a child actor. I don't think everything beautiful has to be exploited. Some things can be beautiful and left beautiful.

I can't say I was unhappy as a child actor in films. I had a particularly wonderful time.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they’re trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that’s beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they’ve spent years just hanging out with adults and they don’t even have a sense of what it’s like to grow up with kids their own age.

Some people manage to make that transition from child actor to adult actor seamlessly. But I felt that if I spent my whole life on a film set without taking a few years to do something else, all I would ever know about was film sets.

I wasn't like a Hollywood child actor - "I'm five! I can sing, I can dance, I can act! I wanna be a star!"

I can now shed the child-actor thing, like the fat, and start a new career, because no one sees me as Dudley.

There's an infantilization that happens to actresses in general - musical theatre, straight theatre, television, film - we're spoken to like children. Actors are spoken to like children a lot of the time.

Some kids are fine, but often I don't like what I see in child actors. My kids are young and they are already showing an interest, so I have to try to discourage them, squash that in them.

My memoir is being published by Beaufort Books and will be available fall of 2015. Its about my unusual life as a child actor and how I made the unpopular choice to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.

I had great parents, and they trained me well and instilled great values in me. They also taught me common sense about money and that I couldn't count on the good fortune of doing a show forever. Therefore, I never spent money I didn't have and didn't end up destitute like other child actors.

I had a hard time at school because I worked, so I was quite often out of school, which meant that I didn't make many friends. It can happen to child actors, because you're not in the school environment. And I did miss that school environment and being around people.

There was not an industry for child actors. I never really made any money. It was all about fun for me.

I went on to host a kids' program from when I was around 10 until 15. In some ways I'm a child actor.

I don't know if child actors are necessarily more screwed up than most people.

I felt a gravitational pull to the material so that there's a certain element of acting that's not really necessary. I've really liked this in foreign movies before or I've observed others working with them and I've noticed that there's a method that goes on where the actors try and get the children, like the child actor, to interact with them in a real way. It seems like you're the adult trying to get the kid to fall in love with him.

I was a child actor, so when I started filming when I was five years old, it was a long time ago.

I didn't want to be a former child actor for the rest of my life, although in some ways I suppose I am. I am going to be that.

I was never really a child actor. I was working sporadically in indie films in Pennsylvania, but I was still living at home.

A lot of child actors think they need to re-invent themselves, especially young women. Usually what they do is they adopt a sort of overt sexuality. It's fine if they want to do that, but a lot of times I think they feel obliged to do that, and that is something that I don't think anybody should feel obliged to express.

I played soccer, and I played in a band, and sometimes I was able to do a movie. And my school would cooperate. It was a very easy way to roll into what later became my profession. It's more innocent. When you're a child actor in the U.S., it's a different thing I think.

I never fully committed to the child actor thing. I also liked being a regular kid and being a student.

So often when you meet child actors, they're weird - they're freaks. No, I mean it, they're really odd people.

I don't feel I was ever a 'famous' child actor. I was just a working actor who happened to be a kid. I was never really in a hit show until I was a teenager with West Wing playing First Daughter Zoey Bartlet. In a way, that was my saving grace - not being a star on a hit show. It kept me working and kept me grounded.

Most aspiring child actors or child stars have a passion for it. But as easy as it is for me to say that I wouldn't put my kids in it, if I saw that they really, really wanted to do and they had the drive, then I would fully support it. As long as there's balance at home, then they could do whatever they wanted to do.

Child actors come off as work being their life and doing it 24/7, but I still have those days where it's totally, like, whatever: shopping, movies, adventures.

I'd see child actors and I'd get so jealous, because they're just completely wide open.

I could have gone the route of a lot of these former child actors, but I didn't want that for myself. Like I said, when I was 14 years old, I decided to quit. I didn't ever want to do it again.

I try to keep away from being bigheaded. That's what causes people to lose the acting thing. They start being commercial, and then they stink the rest of their life. But there are several respected adult actors who were child actors that started very young. I'm going to try to model myself after Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster. Just keep learning from the role and not just go for the money.

I didn't grow up as child actor.

A lot of child actors keep acting for the wrong reasons.

When child actors act well they're just reacting to situations, and they're acting very real because their life experience is so short; there's no history to fall back on.

I've never really felt like I was a child actor. Just an actor who happened to be quite young.

The interesting thing with child actors is that kids are natural actors. They're wonderful actors, and most kids are acting all the time. They're imagining they're out in the yard playing. They're imagining that things happened, and they can get very vivid.

When I was a child actor, I had the fear that I was going to be cast as the tree.

I have a career I am proud of as a child actor. I'm not running away from it or embarassed with anything I did.

If I can make a career for myself after Harry Potter, and it goes well, and is varied and with longevity, then that puts to bed the 'child actors argument'.

For a child actor, its a matter of listening, reacting, and being able to put yourself in a new place without being scared.

People view child actors the same way that girls treat their Barbie dolls.

There's a reason that girls cut off all their Barbie doll's hair and dye it and do things like that. I destroyed my Barbie dolls, and I know other girls did as well. And that's kind of the way they see kids movies and child actors in kids movies, as something that you've moved on from. It's babyish.

Kids kill a show! It's, like, a fun concept when the character is pregnant, but then if a show runs for a while, I'm sorry, but it gets annoying when it starts to talk. You get a child actor in there, and unless that child actor is freakin' awesome, it's going to be annoying.

I enjoyed meeting Emma [Watson]. I have a soft spot in my heart for child actors growing up. I know how hard that is. Having gone through that experience myself, I have a lot of sensitivity to it. For lack of a better word, I just feel like I love these kids, and I want them all to grow up and love themselves, and not get caught up in the wrong things, and to learn all the different things this profession has to give, and to understand it.

The hardest thing in acting is going from child actor to adult actor. It's taken me a long time.

People often say that you should never work with child actors. I think that's all wrong. Children have not had the imagination kicked out of them by life experience and adulthood. So, they still are very much alive with that kind of magical thinking which enables an actor to believe they're in these circumstances and make them real to you.

My daughter's wanted to be an actress since she was six years old, but I didn't want her to go through the same experiences as I did as a child actor.

I was a child actor. I was this spaz kid diagnosed with ADHD, and I worked all the time.

I was a child actor in radio, and there's not many of us left.

Unlike me, a lot of child actors are very short, which is why they work. So when they're 15 they can play 11 or when they're 18 they can play 14. They look young for so long, they have abilities a much younger kid wouldn't have.