TWO CHILD STARS WHO ARE BIGGER TODAY & DIDN'T TURN OUT LIKE LILO

"What if he doesn't exist anymore," asked Christian Bale in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

  That's Christian Bale/aka Batman at left. The photo is from 1987's EMPIRE OF THE SUN, one of Steven Spielberg's least financially-successful flicks. He's been acting since the age of eight and grew up in the projectionist's hometown of Bournemouth, England with a commercial pilot father and a circus dancer mom. So why does he have a happy marriage of more than a dozen years while other talented child stars like Lindsay Lohan flounder?
       If you're expecting a concise answer from the likes of TPC, he can't help you. Many would say it's the  parents. Certainly LiLo's father was a cocaine addict and physically abused her mom. Sorry, no excuse. Others have risen above this.
            Okay, TPC has digressed. But before he moves on from EMPIRE OF THE SUN he should note that a 21-year-old Ben Stiller was also in that film as a young teen. He should also mention another teen, Takataro Kataoko, who played the boy kamikaze pilot and who's still around and will play Emperor Hirohito in the Japanese-financed film, EMPEROR. The movie should be released in the U.S. sometime this year.

Katherine Heigl at age fourteen.

              Let's feature one more, Katherine Heigl, who has a number of excuses to use for being screwed up--except she isn't. When she was eight, her older brother was in an auto accident, brain dead for weeks, before her parents made the decision to donate all his usable organs before letting him pass. While that has altered many lives for better or worse and in Heigl's case, for the better. Now, between movies, she is an activist for organ donations. She has also survived a movie with troubled French actor, Gerard Depardieu and the horror flick BRIDE OF CHUCKY. While TPC is not nominating Heigl for sainthood, he will note that her seven-year marriage to songwriter, Josh Kelly, is still strong and the couple have adopted two children, one, a special needs infant from Korea, who arrived with a congenital heart defect.
       Katie Heigl, TPC has learned, was born in the same DC hospital as the popcorn lady's two children (small world!) and began modeling for the church of Lord & Taylor at the age of eight and acting in movies when she was twelve. Not all that different from LiLo, and perhaps only Yogi Berra can solve the conundrum.
      Wasn't it he who advised, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
       There, TPC and Yogi have just solved the childhood-into-adulthood eternal question.


           
                    Trivia: (yesterday)   Steven Spielberg has won three Oscars. Today: What was the title of the 2004 film for which Christian Bale lost 65 pounds, a record for a Hollywood actor?