Oscars child stars: Where are they now?

Photo credit: Fox Searchlight/Hollywood Pictures / Getty Images
Photo credit: Fox Searchlight/Hollywood Pictures / Getty Images

From Digital Spy

There's just days to go before Jimmy Kimmel hosts the biggest event in the movie world's calendar – the 89th annual Academy Awards.

Ahead of Sunday's ceremony, we look back at the breakthrough roles of some of the youngest Oscar-nominated stars in history – and, more importantly, what they've gone on to do since.

1. Anna Paquin in The Piano

Anna Paquin remains the second youngest Oscar winner in history, after picking up an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her breakthrough role in 1994's haunting The Piano. (The actual piano itself went on to win Best Actor.)

Paquin – now aged 34 – has since gone to appear in Marvel's X-Men franchise and Almost Famous with Kate Hudson. She also starred in the hit HBO vampire series True Blood with off-screen husband Stephen Moyer.

2. Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine

Photo credit: Fox Searchlight / Getty Images
Photo credit: Fox Searchlight / Getty Images

Abigail Breslin was nominated for Best Supporting Actress – the fourth-youngest nominee in that category to date – for her role as Olive Hooper, the adorable, 'Super Freak' dancer in dysfunctional drama Little Miss Sunshine (2006).

She has gone on to appear in My Sister's Keeper (2009) with Cameron Diaz, and Zombieland with Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson.

She most recently featured in the Oscar-nominated August: Osage County with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, the TV series Scream Queens and you can see her next in the TV remake of Dirty Dancing. She's Baby.

3. Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense

Photo credit: Hollywood Pictures / Getty Images
Photo credit: Hollywood Pictures / Getty Images

Haley was nominated for Best Supporting Actor aged 11, for his spine-tingling performance as disturbed, dead-people-seeing Cole Sear in M Night Shyamalan's 1999 thriller The Sixth Sense.

Osment, now 28, went on to play the lead in Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Secondhand Lions (2003) with Robert Duvall.

He was most recently cast in upcoming indie film Tusk, and you'll soon see him in Izzy Gets the F**k Across Town.

4. Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver

Photo credit: Columbia Pictures / Getty Images
Photo credit: Columbia Pictures / Getty Images

Jodie Foster was nominated aged 14 for Best Supporting Actress for her role as teenage prostitute Iris in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), starring alongside Robert De Niro.

Foster went on to win a Best Actress Academy Award for her role in The Accused (1988), followed by another win for her performance as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs (1991).

She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as the reclusive Nell in the 1994 film of the same title, and has since starred in Panic Room, Inside Man and Elysium.

Next up is "futuristic thriller" Hotel Artemis, with Dave Bautista.

5. Mary Badham in To Kill a Mockingbird

Photo credit: Universal International Pictures / Getty Images
Photo credit: Universal International Pictures / Getty Images

Mary Badham earned a nomination for her portrayal of the iconic Scout in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962, aged just 10. At the time, she was the youngest ever nominee in that category, ultimately losing out to a then 16-year-old Patty Duke for The Miracle Worker.

Badham went on to star in the final episode of the original Twilight Zone series and movies Let's Kill Uncle, Before Uncle Kills Us and This Property Is Condemned – both released in 1966.

She then retired from acting aside from a brief a cameo in Our Very Own, which was released in 2005. Now aged 64, she works as an art restorer and a college testing coordinator.

6. Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider

Photo credit: South Pacific Pictures / Getty Images
Photo credit: South Pacific Pictures / Getty Images

Keisha Castle-Hughes made her acting debut as the plucky Pai in 2002's heartwarming Whale Rider, for which she was Oscar nominated for Best Actress. Aged 12 at the time, she was the youngest ever nominee in the category until Quvenzhané Wallis's nomination for Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2013.

Castle-Hughes went on to star in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in 2005, and Mary in Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story a year later.

Now 26 years of age and based in Los Angeles, Castle-Hughes most recently starred in Game Of Thrones as Obara Sand.

7. Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit

Photo credit: Paramount Pictures / Getty Images
Photo credit: Paramount Pictures / Getty Images

Hailee Steinfeld gained a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for her breakthrough role in the Coen brothers' 2010 western True Grit.

The 20-year-old actress has starred alongside Keira Knightley in Can a Song Save Your Life?, and also played the lead in Romeo and Juliet opposite Douglas Booth. But she's best known for the Pitch Perfect films, in which she plays Emily Junk, and for her pop career.


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