Background
Haley Osment was born on 10 April 1988 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is the son of a teacher and an actor (Eugene Osment).
Haley Osment was born on 10 April 1988 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is the son of a teacher and an actor (Eugene Osment).
Educated in Flintridge Preparatory School in La Cañada, California. Favorite classes: Science, Language Arts, History and Math
He later entered Tisch School of the Arts.
Osment appeared in his first TV project when he was only four in a television commercial for Pizza Hut. Just one year later, he made his feature film debut, playing Forrest Gump Jr. in the Oscar-winning smash "Forrest Gump". By the time he was 10 years old, Osment had racked up an impressive number of TV credits, landing roles on "Thunder Alley "and "The Jeff Foxworthy Show", in addition to appearing in several TV movies.
Still, he had those normal, dues-paying years before his big breakthrough in The Sixth Sense: Mixed Nuts (94, Nora Ephron); a lead role, a woeful orphan, in Bogus (96. Norman Jewison); Last Stand at Saber River (97, Dick Lowry); redoing the George Winslow role for TV in The Ransom of Red Chief (98, Bob Clark).
The Sixth Sense (99, M. Night Shyamalan) was an exceptional film, a very canny merger of horror and those few movies that deal in a child’s perception of the immense world. He gave a fine performance, much aided by Bruce Willis and his director, both of whom could truly claim that it would have been impossible without the kid. In turn, Pay It Forward (00, Mimi Leder) was a horrible exploitation in which the boy’s grace barely survived. Far more intriguing was A.I. Artificial Intelligence (01, Steven Spielberg), in which Osment was uncannily good as the robot/puppet coming to life, but ultimately betrayed by the inability of his director to keep control of the very ambitious material.
His voice is used in The Country Bears (02, Peter Hastings).
Young Mr. Osment has been good (at least) on screen too many times now for anyone to have doubts. He is a brilliantly skilled and intuitive actor who carries the natural, and ordinary, charm without ever milking it. It is instructive to consider how far modern filmmakers now like to employ child characters to reach their audience, but also to mine the more timeless and universal aura of the child’s experience.