Fred Savage The Princess Bride (1987)
Fred Aaron Savage was born in 1976 in Highland Park, Illinois. He had begun acting at age nine in commercials and television guest spots; his first feature was The Boy Who Could Fly (1986). He was eleven when The Princess Bride shot, and one year shy of the lead role on The Wonder Years (1988–1993) that would make him a household face.
The grandson — sick in bed with a baseball video game when the film opens — is the third protagonist of The Princess Bride, after Westley and Inigo. His arc is the audience's: from interrupting the kissing scenes to demanding sports, complaining when characters do not stay dead, asking who gets Humperdinck, and finally, at the doorway, asking the grandfather to come back tomorrow.b1b40
A child actor doing actual work
Savage's scenes are structurally critical. Each interruption from the bedroom is the film's permission for the audience to be skeptical of the next romance beat, and his eventual surrender to the story (asking for one more reading) is the structural payoff of the entire frame. The performance is small and unfussy. He is not asked to be cute; he is asked to be representatively skeptical, then representatively moved, in a register that does not make the film's earnestness embarrassing.
"Fred was eleven, but he was a real actor. He understood what the frame was doing. He didn't play 'a kid.' He played a kid who was being read to, which is a different thing." — Rob Reiner, Vanity Fair (2012)
What Peter Falk gave him
Savage has said in interviews that working with Falk taught him most of what he learned about acting on a film set. The bedroom scenes were filmed in long days with the two of them and a small crew; Falk treated him not as a child but as a scene partner.
"Peter Falk was the kindest, gentlest, most patient man. He treated me like a fellow actor, not a kid. That's where I learned how to do this job." — Fred Savage, Entertainment Weekly (2017)
After the bedroom
The Wonder Years opened in 1988 and ran six seasons, making Savage one of the most recognizable child actors of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He continued in features (Vice Versa, Little Monsters, The Wizard) through his teens. His adult career has been primarily as a director — episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Modern Family, Phil of the Future, Party Down, and the Wonder Years reboot. He was fired from The Wonder Years reboot in 2022 following an internal misconduct investigation.