I know you hear horror stories about child actors, but I think in my family when I did start acting it was never a big deal.
I'd like to see myself married with a child and hopefully still involved in the entertainment business as an actor who is also able to write a bit and direct some projects.
Having been a child actor, I remember how directors would trick me to get good performances out of me. I don't think you need to do that.
So often when you meet child actors, they're weird - they're freaks. No, I mean it, they're really odd people.
There are certain expectations that are put on you as a child actor, but mainly it's just turn up and say your lines with a lot of energy and a cute smile.
I never dreamed that shooting a film would be so hard. There was less regulation then of child actors' hours. Even the concept of acting confused me.
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.
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.
A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.'
Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.
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 guess I was a child actor. Acting was one of the things I did alongside going to school: I'd be playing guitar, I'd be playing soccer, and I would be acting in movies.
I started to study, because I knew I had to learn a lot about myself as an actor; you can't act the same as you did as a child.
I hate the stereotype of the pitfalls of the child actor. There are so many amazing examples - Natalie Portman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jodie Foster, Drew Barrymore - of people who have made it through.
But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.
After an 18-year career, I left the film industry, not wanting to become one of those child-actor cautionary tales.
I have had the occasion to meet child actors from the '60s and '70s at various functions, and everyone's gone on to various different lives - they're real-estate agents or surfers.
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 lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.
As a child, I always remember our home, which was a flat just on the Barnes side of Hammersmith Bridge in London, buzzing with actors such as Patrick McGee and Peter Bowles. We were a family who were always on the go.
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.
