Aspirant actors who start out in their childhood or their teens are taking a huge risk in an industry where the casualty rate for young actors is dauntingly high. For every Jodie Foster and Elizabeth Taylor, there are hundreds of young actors who found their services no longer required when they grew older. Take the fate of Macaulay Culkin, who was turned into a juvenile superstar through the Home Alone movies in the early 1990s - and passed his sell-by date before the end of the decade.
There are other problems for young actors, as Tobey Maguire explains, reflecting on the experiences of himself and his close friend Leonardo DiCaprio when they were in their teens. "Older people tend to underestimate you when you're that age and they can be very condescending," he says. "I think probably anyone around that age can relate to that. I just hate that feeling when people are talking down to you. It's a bit like people putting on baby voices when they talk to children."
Now 24, Maguire - and, of course, his more famous friend, DiCaprio - are among those rare survivors of teen roles. There were times, Maguire says, when he didn't think he would make it, but his tenacity, discernment and ability won out. His range is demonstrated in three recent productions - the underestimated Ride With the Devil, which is back at the IFC in Dublin this weekend; the big surprise in this year's Oscar nominations, The Cider House Rules, which goes on release in Ireland next Friday; and Wonder Boys, which opened this month to enthusiastic reviews in the US and is due here in September.
When we talked in London recently Tobey Maguire was looking exhausted and was less than expansive in his conversation. However, this was not the result of the decadent movie star lifestyle, given that Maguire is one of those rare actors of his generation who does not drink, smoke, take drugs or eat meat. "I'm by no means a saint," he says, stifling one of many yawns. "I just happen to not do those things."
He was born in Los Angeles to parents who were still in their teens and who divorced when he was two. Living in Palm Springs when he was 11, he had an elective class at school. Because his father is a chef, he decided to take home economics - until his mother promised him $100 if he took drama instead. He made his screen debut in an Atari commercial and started to get minor spots in TV series such as Roseanne and Walker, Texas Ranger. While working on the short-lived TV spin-off from the movie Parenthood, Maguire met Leonardo DiCaprio, and in 1993 both of them auditioned for the role of the traumatised son in This Boy's Life, which featured Ellen Barkin as the boy's mother and Robert De Niro as her tyrannical new partner.
Maguire says the thought of reading with De Niro for the role terrified him and that he gave a "very poor" audition as a result. The part went to DiCaprio, although Maguire was given a much smaller role in the film. In 1995 Maguire was cast with Kate Capshaw and Uma Thurman in The Duke of Groove, a short film directed by actor Griffin Dunne. It was nominated for an Oscar and brought Maguire to the attention of producers and directors for the first time.
Supporting roles followed in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (as the randy shoe salesman) and Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When the Taiwanese director, Ang Lee, cast him in the difficult role as the precocious, alienated son of an adulterous father (Kevin Kline) and an emotionally brittle mother (Joan Allen) in the searing, early-Seventies-set drama, The Ice Storm, Maguire responded admirably to the challenge.
A year later he went on to secure his first leading role in Gary Ross's imaginative and beguiling fantasy film, Pleasantville, in which he and Reese Witherspoon played a present-day brother and sister plunged into the world of a conservative 1950s television show. And once again one of his parents was played by Joan Allen, albeit this time his mother within the TV show.
"It was wonderful to work with Joan again," he says. "She has so much grace and she's such a professional. She's very warm and giving, and so ego-less. She's like a computer in that she just punches in all the elements of a character and can produce them whenever they're needed, and she does it all so naturally." Having worked with Joan Allen twice, he then was reunited with their director on The Ice Storm, Ang Lee, who offered him the leading role in the handsome and haunting anti-war drama, Ride With the Devil, set on the Kansas-Missouri border in 1861 during the American Civil War.
Maguire impressively played a poor German immigrant's son, Jake Roedel, one of the young and inexperienced pro-Southern bushwhackers engaged in guerilla warfare on the back roads and across the countryside. In the film's most moving sequence, Jake, one of the few who is literate, reads aloud a heart-wrenching letter from a woman whose sons are caught up in the war.
"I was really surprised when Ang Lee asked me to work with him a second time, and really, really happy to do it," Maguire says. "He's a very sweet man, but very hardworking. His approach is to be very hands-on with the actors, and in both films he gave me a lot of resources and materials to prepare for the roles I was playing. He keeps you really busy. It's important to him that if, say, I've got to ride a horse, like I do in Ride With the Devil, that it looks like I am used to it and I've had a couple of months to get used for it.
"And he believes in psychological preparation, too, so he set up for us to meet people who were experts on the civil war, the time period, and the psychology of killing in wartime. Then there was the dialect we were speaking, which was quite different. If I gave you those lines to say right now, I'm sure it would be quite difficult the first few times. It took a lot of practice to get the phrasing right and to make the lines sound natural. It's almost like learning a different language and trying not to think about it too much when you're speaking it and not being self-conscious about it."
Maguire is featured to even more impressive effect in Lasse Hallstrom's enthralling film of The Cider House Rules, adapted by John Irving from his own 1985 novel and nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture and director. Maguire plays Homer Wells, an orphan who is returned by two sets of adoptive parents to St Cloud's orphanage in rural Maine where he is raised by the unorthodox and morphine-addicted Dr Wilbur Larch, beautifully played by Michael Caine in an Oscar-nominated performance.
THIS poignant Dickensian drama is shot through with an endearingly offbeat sense of humour as it follows the initially naive and idealistic Homer Wells on an eventful journey of coming-of-age and self-discovery. And it is rendered deeply affecting under the sensitive direction of the Swedish director, Hallstrom, who's firmly back to the form of his earlier My Life As a Dog after a series of disappointing American movies.
"I felt really open and free working on Cider House," Maguire says. "Lasse invited me to contribute any ideas I had, and I had a lot of ideas about how to play Homer. It was a real collaboration. We were really in synch as to how we wanted to do it. I really wanted to underplay a lot of Homer's scenes and Lasse felt that was the way to go."
The film had an unusually long gestation period, during which at one point its producer Richard N. Gladstein, having spotted Maguire in The Duke of Groove, decided to cast him as Buster, one of the younger orphans. Over the next four years, "Tobey grew into Homer", as Gladstein puts it, and the role of Buster was given to Kieran Culkin, younger brother of the afore-mentioned Macaulay.
"I hadn't read the book when I was reading the screenplay," says Maguire, "and I only got to read it just before we shot the movie. I think the book and the film both stand on their own. I think the movie has the heart of the book, but they're very different as well. I think it's a fantastic story, a great journey for this character. I liked it because it's so complex and rich, yet at the same time it's very accessible."
In the film, young Homer is delivering babies at the orphanage - even though he never went to high school, not to mind medical school - but he draws the line at assisting Dr Larch in carrying out the abortions which the doctor justifies by saying that otherwise the women would go elsewhere and suffer at the hands of backstreet abortionists.
The movie's handling of the abortion issue could have been a hot potato. "But we've had no negative feedback on that aspect of the film," says Maguire. "It really hasn't come up. I'm not too worried about it, and I think the film handles it in a pretty delicate way."
Coincidentally, on both those recent productions, Maguire was working with singers who had no acting experience - Jewel in Ride With the Devil and Erykah Badu in The Cider House Rules. "I didn't really see them like that, as singers working as actors," says Maguire. "Erykah put her heart into it from the word go and she had a great attitude. I think it took Jewel a week or two to get her bearings, but she really took off then."
After working on a succession of period movies, Maguire now features in a contemporary setting in director Curtis Hanson's first film since the award-winning LA Confidential, the screen treatment of Michael Chabon's novel, Wonder Boys.
"It's a great book and Steve Kloves did a fantastic adaptation," says Maguire. "It takes places over three days. Michael Douglas plays a professor whose wife has told him she's leaving him. His lover, played by Frances McDormand, tells him she is pregnant. And he has owed a book to a publishing company for nine years and his editor, Robert Downey Jr, has come into town. Then a brilliant suicidal student, played by me, is sort of dropped into his lap. And that's not all. It's a really pivotal three days in his life."
The Cider House Rules opens next Friday