They were given everything—money, fame, adoration—and then sent back to homes where someone else spent the money. Most survived the damage. A few became the damage. The industry that built them rarely wanted to talk about which was which.

What follows comes from court records, memoirs, and the men themselves. These are ten more child stars whose adult lives went badly wrong in ways that hurt other people.

Roddy McDowall was evacuated from London during the Blitz and became a star in America within a year, carrying How Green Was My Valley at 13. He then did what almost no child actor manages: built a real adult career in Planet of the Apes, Cleopatra, and 150 other things over 50 years. He was also the most connected man in Hollywood. He knew everybody. He photographed everybody. His house was where people went.

And that was precisely the problem, because Roddy McDowall was also recording them.

McDowall kept an enormous private archive. Part of it was film prints. In 1974, the FBI raided his home and seized around 160 film prints and about 1,000 video tapes as part of a piracy investigation. He was not prosecuted—and the reason he was not prosecuted is the part that matters.

McDowall cooperated, and cooperating meant naming other collectors in the industry. The list he gave them included Rock Hudson and Mel Tormé, among others. Those names went into a federal file because a friend put them there.

Separately, McDowall had for years been taping private conversations with famous friends, ostensibly for an oral history. He left instructions that a portion of that material be sealed for many years after his death. The people on those tapes had been speaking to a friend in a living room. Whatever his intentions, he was collecting them.

He died of cancer in 1998 at 70. The tributes were enormous and completely sincere, because he had also spent 50 years being generous to younger actors and had genuinely earned the affection. But the boy from How Green Was My Valley is still there in a film people study. The man he became held a great deal of material on the people who trusted him—and handed some of it to the government.

Between 1957 and 1963, Tommy Kirk was one of the most valuable young performers Walt Disney had. He was the lead in Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, Swiss Family Robinson, The Absent-Minded Professor. Those films made enormous amounts of money, and his face was on the merchandise for all of them.

In 1963, Disney fired him. The reason was that the studio had learned he was gay. Kirk confirmed this himself decades later, describing being called in and told the contract was finished. He was 21.

What he did with the next 15 years is the reason he is on this list. Kirk went from Disney to beach party films to genuinely terrible low-budget science fiction. And somewhere in the middle of that, he became a heavy drug user—and then, by his own repeated public admission, a dealer.

He was arrested for possession in 1964, which effectively ended any remaining chance of mainstream work. He told interviewers openly that he had sold drugs, that he had stolen, and that he had been an unpleasant person to the people who tried to help him. He was homeless at points in the 1970s.

He got clean eventually and did something unglamorous and sensible: opened a carpet and upholstery cleaning business in Los Angeles that he ran for around 25 years. He was completely candid about all of it for the rest of his life and never blamed anyone but himself, which counts for a great deal.

He died alone at his home in Las Vegas in 2021 at 79. His body was found by a neighbor.

There is a detail about the Disney firing that puts the rest in context. Kirk was not fired for anything he did at work. He was fired because the studio found out who he was at a time when that was legally and commercially fatal. He was given no warning, no severance, and no explanation he could use. He was the biggest young male star the studio had. One week later, he was unemployable.

He has said in interviews that he simply did not know how to be anything other than a Disney actor, because he had been one since he was 13—and that the drugs filled the space where the job had been.

The low point is documented because he documented it. Kirk described stealing from people who let him stay with them, dealing to support his own use, and burning through every professional relationship he had. He was in and out of jail. By the mid-1970s, he was sleeping in cars.

The carpet cleaning business was not a joke or a punchline. It was a genuine second life that he built from nothing at around 40 and ran successfully until he retired. He turned up at fan conventions in his later years and answered every question anyone asked, including the ugly ones.

The boy crying over his dog in Old Yeller is still making children cry. The man he became sold drugs for a decade and said so himself in plain terms to anyone who asked.

Eddie Haskell is one of the great supporting characters in American television—the neighborhood kid who is grotesquely polite to Mrs. Cleaver and vicious the moment she leaves the room. Ken Osmond played him for six seasons from the age of 14. The performance was so complete that it ended his acting career, because nobody would cast him as anything else. By his early 20s, he could not get work.

So he did something genuinely admirable. In 1970, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department and served for 18 years, mostly as a motorcycle officer. In 1980, while chasing a suspected car thief on foot, he was shot three times. A bullet hit his belt buckle and another hit his bulletproof vest. He survived. That is a real act of public service and it should be stated first.

What followed is the other half. Osmond retired from the force on disability in 1988, and in 1991, the department challenged his pension. He was investigated, and in 1996, he pleaded no contest to a felony charge of insurance fraud relating to a disability claim after an investigation found evidence inconsistent with the injury he had claimed. He received probation, and the felony was later reduced.

The money involved was substantial, and it had come out of a public pension fund. Osmond largely stopped giving interviews about the period afterward and returned to occasional Leave It to Beaver reunion work. He died in 2020 at 76 of respiratory failure.

The typecasting story is worth telling properly because it explains the whole shape of his life. Eddie Haskell was such a specific creation that the name entered the language. American parents used it for decades to describe a certain kind of two-faced teenager. That is an extraordinary thing for a supporting character to achieve. It also meant that when Leave It to Beaver ended in 1963, Ken Osmond was 18 years old and permanently unhireable, because every casting director in Los Angeles looked at him and saw a smirk.

He tried for seven years. He did a handful of small parts and then stopped. There is also a persistent urban legend attached to him that he spent years denying—the rumor that he had grown up to become the rock musician Alice Cooper, or in other versions, the adult film performer John Holmes. Neither was remotely true, and both circulated for decades before the internet. He found the whole thing exhausting. He took a police job partly because it was one of the few employers in Los Angeles that did not care what he had done at 14.

Eddie Haskell is still being oily to somebody’s mother in reruns that have run continuously for 65 years. The man who played him spent 18 years as a police officer—and then took money from the fund that was supposed to look after the ones who got hurt.

One thing has to be said before we go further, because it runs through every entry here. California passed the Coogan Act in 1939, named after Jackie Coogan, the first child star to discover at 21 that his mother had spent everything he ever earned. The law was supposed to protect a portion of a minor’s income in trust.

For the next 50 years, it protected almost nobody, because it applied only to contracts approved by a court, and the studios simply structured around it. So the standard experience of everyone on this list was to earn a fortune as a child, hand it to an adult, and find out later that it was gone.

That does not excuse a single thing any of them did afterward. It does explain why so many of them arrived at 21 with no money, no education, and no idea how to be a person.

Jackie Cooper was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor at 9 years old for Skippy in 1931, and he is still the youngest man ever nominated in that category. He worked with Wallace Beery in The Champ. He was a genuine phenomenon.

The reason he is here is that he told on himself at length in a 1981 memoir called Please Don’t Shoot My Dog, which is one of the strangest documents any former child star has published. In it, Cooper describes being made to cry on camera by adults who told him his dog had been shot—which is where the title comes from—and then he goes on to describe his own adult life with a coldness that startled reviewers at the time.

He details affairs conducted while married, including one with a much older actress when he was in his teens, and he describes his treatment of women through the 1940s and 1950s in terms that read as boastful rather than regretful. He also describes his relationship with his own children in ways that several critics found chilling.

Professionally, Cooper became an executive, running Screen Gems television production in the 1960s, and people who worked under him described a ruthless operator who fired freely and was contemptuous of performers—which is a notable position for a man who had been one at nine. He directed a great deal of television later and won two Emmys for it. And he played Perry White in the Superman films to a whole new generation. He died in 2011 at 88.

The Skippy nomination came with a story Cooper told for the rest of his life: the director Norman Taurog, who happened to be his uncle, produced the tears in the film’s key scene by pretending to have a studio security guard take Cooper’s dog away and shoot it off camera. Cooper was nine. He heard the gunshot. Taurog won the Academy Award for Best Director that year for the film.

Cooper’s own account of it in the book is delivered without much emotion at all, which is somehow the worst part.

His executive years are where the arrogance became other people’s problem rather than his own. As head of Screen Gems television production in the 1960s, Cooper oversaw dozens of series and was known for making casting and firing decisions without consultation. Performers who dealt with him described a man who had no patience for actors and made sure they knew it. Given his own history, that reads less like ordinary corporate coldness and more like someone settling an old score with the wrong people.

The little boy at the boxing ring in The Champ is one of the most famous images of the 1930s. The man he grew into wrote down what he had done to people and seemed to expect to be admired for the honesty.

Gary Crosby was performing on his father’s radio show at four years old, had a recording career as a teenager, and appeared in films and television from the early 1950s onward. Being Bing Crosby’s eldest son was the entire structure of his life, and it was, by his account and by his brothers’, a brutal childhood involving regular beatings with a belt, weekly weigh-ins, and punishments for going over a set weight.

In 1983, six years after his father’s death, he published Going My Own Way and detonated the most beloved image in American entertainment. Two of his brothers backed him. A third called him a liar in public until the day he died.

The book is the reason most people know Gary Crosby’s name, and it is also where his own story gets complicated, because the man writing it was by then an alcoholic with a long record of his own. Crosby was arrested for drunk driving. He was violent when drinking and admitted it. His own family life had broken down. He acknowledged in interviews that he had repeated a good deal of what had been done to him, which is common, and which does not make it less true for the people on the receiving end.

Two of his brothers, Lindsay and Dennis, took their own lives with firearms in 1989 and 1991. Gary had by then been sober for some years and spoke publicly about addiction until he died of lung cancer in 1995 at 62.

The reception of the book at the time tells you how much it cost him. Going My Own Way came out in 1983, and the American press largely sided with the dead man. Columnists called Gary ungrateful and mercenary. He was accused of cashing in. Bob Hope publicly defended Bing. Dennis and Lindsay confirmed the beatings and were largely ignored, and Phillip gave interviews for years calling all three of them liars, at one point telling a reporter he would like to kick Gary in the behind for writing it.

There was no version of this in which Gary came out looking well.

What makes him belong on a list like this, rather than on a list of victims, is what he did with the years after. Crosby was violent when drunk and did not dispute it. He lost jobs. Two marriages ended. He was candid in the 1990s that he had reproduced a version of his father’s temper in his own house, which is an unusually honest thing to say publicly, and does not undo any of it for the people who lived through it.

The Crosby Christmas specials are still broadcast every December. The eldest son in the matching sweater told the country what the house was actually like—and then had to admit how much of it he had carried forward himself.

Kirk Cameron was 14 when Growing Pains made him America’s biggest teen idol. Around 1987 he had a religious conversion, and then he began issuing demands to the writers about content—objecting to storylines, jokes, lines of dialogue he considered immoral. Because he was the reason a significant part of the audience was watching, producers had to negotiate with a teenager about what the show was allowed to be.

The clearest incident involved Julie McCullough, the actress playing his girlfriend. McCullough had been a Playboy Playmate before being cast. In 1991 she was written out abruptly, and she has said for 30 years that she was told it was because of Cameron’s objections to her past.

She was engaged to Cameron at the time, and the relationship ended with the firing. He has denied being responsible. Cameron went on to a long career in faith-based films and remains a prominent public figure.

Mike Seaver is still the charming older brother in reruns. The actor playing him got his own fiancee removed from the cast—or at minimum was the reason she was—and she is still saying so.

So here is the pattern, laid out plain: ten children handed an adult’s income and an adult’s schedule, then sent home to a house where somebody else spent the money. Some came out damaged. A few came out dangerous. The industry that built them never wanted to talk about which was which.

Which of these ten do you think got the fairest shake—and which one are you still not sure about? Tell us in the comments.