Tatum O'Neal Bad News Bears
Tatum O'Neal (born November 5, 1963, Los Angeles) starred as Amanda Whurlitzer in The Bad News Bears (1976). She was twelve years old at the time of release and the youngest person to have ever won a competitive Academy Award — for her debut performance in Paper Moon (1973) at age ten, a record she still holds.
Paper Moon made her an Oscar winner at ten
Tatum O'Neal — the daughter of actor Ryan O'Neal and actress Joanna Moore — made her film debut opposite her father in Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973), playing a nine-year-old con-artist's apprentice in a Depression-era road movie. The performance won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress — the youngest competitive Oscar winner in history, a record that has never been broken. (wikipedia, oscars)
The Academy's recognition put her on a track that very few child actors had ever been on. The Bad News Bears was her second feature.
Amanda Whurlitzer was a $350,000 role
Paramount paid O'Neal a salary reportedly around $350,000 plus a percentage of the film's gross — at the time the largest contract ever paid to a child actor. The size of the deal reflected both her Paper Moon Oscar and the centrality of Amanda to the film's structural project. (wikipedia)
The role required pitching. O'Neal trained with a coach for several weeks before production. The pitches the audience sees in Amanda's debut — three strikeouts of an opposing batter — are O'Neal's own, shot in close enough on the windup and follow-through to make the work visible.
"Tatum O'Neal somehow manages to bring off the difficult role of an eleven-year-old girl pitcher with a curveball and a sharp tongue." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1976)
What the part required structurally was the most adult presence on the field — a child who negotiates her own terms (twelve ballet lessons, French jeans, modeling money), refuses Buttermaker's first overture cleanly, and at the dinner-refusal scene in Beat 26 calls his bluff that he is what he says he is. O'Neal plays it with the same flat, transactional poise she brought to Paper Moon. The Buttermaker / Amanda dynamic is the film's emotional anchor; the Buttermaker / Kelly dynamic is the film's strategic engine.
Her career did not extend past her teens at the same level
O'Neal's career after The Bad News Bears did not continue at the Paper Moon / Buttermaker level. She made Nickelodeon (1976), reuniting with Bogdanovich and her father; International Velvet (1978), the National Velvet sequel; and Little Darlings (1980), a teen-summer-camp comedy opposite Kristy McNichol that performed well commercially.
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Paper Moon | Best Supporting Actress Oscar |
| 1976 | The Bad News Bears | Amanda Whurlitzer |
| 1976 | Nickelodeon | Bogdanovich; second collaboration |
| 1978 | International Velvet | British production |
| 1980 | Little Darlings | Teen camp comedy |
| 1985 | Certain Fury | Action thriller |
| 1991 | Little Noises | Indie comedy |
She left film acting in her early twenties, returned in supporting roles in the 1990s and 2000s (including a recurring role on Sex and the City), and has worked in television and the occasional film since.
Her memoir documented the cost
In her 2004 memoir A Paper Life, O'Neal wrote about the difficulties of growing up in her father's household, her struggles with addiction, and the toll the Oscar and the early stardom had taken. The book was a New York Times bestseller. (wikipedia)