History
First presented on May 16, 1929, the Academy Awards did not originally present a Special Award for Juvenile actors. The very first child actor to be nominated for an Oscar was 9-year-old Jackie Cooper who was nominated as Best Actor in 1931 for his work in the film Skippy, but lost that year to Lionel Barrymore. Recognizing that children could be placed at an unfair disadvantage with Academy voters when nominated alongside their adult counterparts in the competitive Best Actor/Actress categories, and with no categories for Best Supporting Actor/Actress having yet been established, the Academy saw the need to establish an Honorary "Special Award" specifically created to recognize juveniles under the age of eighteen for their work in film.
On February 27, 1935, the 7th Annual Academy Awards honoring achievements in film for the year 1934, became the first Oscar ceremony to award the Special Juvenile Award. Playfully dubbed the "Oscarette" by Bob Hope in 1945, the statuette itself was a miniaturized Oscar, depicting an Art Deco image of a knight holding a crusader's sword and standing on a reel of film. Standing approximately ½ the size of its full-sized counterpart, this rare child-sized trophy remained the prototype for the statuette throughout the history of the Award with only relatively small modifications to its base over time.
After first being presented in 1935, the Special Juvenile Award continued to be presented intermittently to a total of 12 young actors over the next 25 years, however, several juvenile actors were instead nominated in the competitive Best Supporting Actor/Actress categories during this time; most notably, 14-year-old Bonita Granville as Best Supporting Actress of 1936 for These Three, 11-year-old Brandon deWilde as Best Supporting Actor of 1953 for Shane, 17-year-old Sal Mineo as Best Supporting Actor of 1955 for Rebel Without a Cause, and 11-year-old Patty McCormack as Best Supporting Actress of 1956 for The Bad Seed, all of whom lost to their adult counterparts in their respective categories.
Presented on April 17, 1961, the 33rd Annual Academy Awards honoring achievements in film for the year 1960 would be the last Oscar ceremony to present the Honorary Juvenile Award. The following year, 16 year-old Patty Duke starred in The Miracle Worker and in 1963, was nominated for and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the film, becoming the youngest actress at the time to ever win an Academy Award of merit and, for the first time, proving that a child could win in a competitive category. From this point onward, child actors were recognized in the same categories as their adult counterparts, or not at all.
Read more about this topic: Academy Juvenile Award
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