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The bitter observation of child actor Bobby Driscoll, who won a special Academy Award for his performance in The Window (1949), sums up the attitude of many actors that have found themselves built up and feted, only to be cast aside by the studio system’s ruthless prioritising of the bottom line. The annals of Hollywood history are littered with tales of child actors financially exploited by guardians; worn down by unrelenting schedules; terrorised by directors and moguls; sinking into addiction and, in the case of some such as Driscoll, succumbing to early deaths. Invariably, the stories of the casualties make for juicy reading—even if the particular star rarely profits from book sales—but accounts of those that emerged from the system relatively unscathed, or that voluntarily checked out of it, are rarer and generally elicit less interest from the public.