Actor Owen Cooper may be the youngest ever male Emmy winner but a host of other young stars were first to take out top awards

Owen Cooper made history last week when he became the youngest male to win an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series for his role in Adolescence.

But while Cooper was just 15 when he waltzed away with his Emmy, he was not the youngest ever Emmy winner, nor the youngest actor to receive major acting awards for their work, with two pre-teens winning Oscars.

Let's take a look back at some of the history-making performances of these talented young people.

Tatum O'Neal

Tatum O'Neal was just 10 when she made history after becoming the youngest person to win a competitive Academy Award – a record that still stands today.

O'Neal, the daughter of legendary actor and heartthrob Ryan O'Neal and actress Joanna Moore, received the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for what was her first ever acting gig, opposite her dad, in the film Paper Moon.

It was apparently O'Neal senior who first suggested his daughter for the part, lobbying director Peter Bogdanovich to give her an audition.

She was cast as Addie Loggins, the daughter of her father's character Moses Pray, a con artist who meets his daughter for the first time at the grave of her mother.

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O'Neal was eight when filming began, and won critical acclaim for her astute and assured performance.

As well as the Oscar, she also won a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year – Actress.

She went on to star in The Bad News Bears, International Velvet and the coming-of-age flick Little Darlings, before marrying former tennis player John McEnroe.

They had three children before divorcing in 1994. She returned to acting with a string of roles in the 2000s, however, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and suffered a stroke brought on by drug use in 2020.

She is now clean but has not worked since.

Anna Paquin

New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion was looking for a little girl to play one of the lead roles in her 1993 film The Piano when she took out a newspaper ad announcing an open audition for the role of Flora McGrath.

Paquin, then just nine, beat out 5000 others, including her older sister, to win the role of the daughter of a mute Scottish woman, played by Holly Hunter, who travels to New Zealand for an arranged marriage to Alisdair Stewart, played by Sam Neill.

Paquin won praise for her portrayal and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, at 11, making her the second youngest behind O'Neal.

After not initially taking on any more roles, Paquin returned to acting in her early teens, with roles in Jane Eyre, Fly Away Home, Amistad, She's All That and other films while completing her schooling in the US.

She attended college for one year before returning to acting with roles in X-Men and Almost Famous before joining the cast of TV's vampire drama True Blood, where she played Sookie Stackhouse for seven seasons.

In 2019, she appeared in Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed drama, The Irishman.

She is married to her True Blood co-star Stephen Moyer and they are parents of twins, Charlie and Poppy, who were born in 2012.

In 2024, Paquin stepped out using a cane on the red carpet and revealed she had suffered health problems for the past two years that had affected her speech and mobility.

Paquin has chosen not to reveal the cause of her health problems.

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Ricky Schroder

Ricky Schroder was a child model when he auditioned for the role of TJ in a remake of the film The Champ.

Director Franco Zeffirelli had been searching for the perfect child to play the son of a former boxer, played by Jon Voight, and saw thousands of children over six months.

He cast Schroder as soon as saw his audition, and later described him as "heaven-sent" and a "jewel of a boy".

The film was released in 1979, and many critics credited his performance as the best ever by a child actor.

When he was nine, he won the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture – Male at the 1980 awards – becoming the youngest ever recipient of a Golden Globe.

His parents pulled him out of school and his mother moved with him to LA. He appeared in the Disney film The Last Flight of Noah's Ark, and in Little Lord Fauntleroy, opposite Sir Alec Guinness, before a stand-out role in the 1980 Australian film The Earthling.

He then starred in the long-running TV series Silver Spoons, although he didn't enjoy acting in a comedy. 

To make the transition to adult roles, he changed his name from Ricky to Rick on the advice of an agent, but reverted back after 18 years.

One of his best-known adult roles was as Detective Danny Sorenson in the hit crime show NYPD Blue. He later worked as a director and producer.

He told Fox News last year he "never fit in Hollywood", however he said he had "no real regrets".

"As I look back on my life, as far as professionally, I had the best opportunities I took when they came along. I tried to develop opportunities as best I could."

Schroder was married to Andrea Bernard, with whom he shares four children. They separated in 2016. He married Julie Trammel in July this year.

Roxana Zal

Roxana Zal was just 14 when she made history by becoming the youngest ever winner of a Primetime Emmy Award.

Zal was named Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie at the 1984 awards for her title role in the television film Something About Amelia.

Despite her young age, it was not her first role, having first appeared in an episode of the TV series Hart to Hart after her aunt persuaded her parents to let her take acting classes.

More roles followed before she was cast as sexual abuse survivor Amelia Bennett opposite Glenn Close and Ted Danson as her parents.

The role also earned her a nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film, but she did not win.

She worked steadily as an actress, appearing in dozens of films and TV shows, which at times she juggled with college – she attended University of California Los Angeles – but ultimately retired from acting and now makes a living designing vintage one of a kind dresses and styling musicians.

She told TMZ this week she was blown away by Cooper's Emmy Award-winning performance and had been rooting for him to win.

Kylie Minogue 

Kylie Minogue was already the darling of the Aussie entertainment industry when at 19, she became the youngest person to ever win the coveted Gold Logie at Australian television's night of nights, the Logie Awards.

Not only that, but Minogue, who at the time starred in soap Neighbours, also became the only person to snag four Logies in one year when she also won Most Popular Actress, Most Popular Music Video for her song Locomotion, and Most Popular Personality on Victorian Television.

Her Logies haul was only the start of things to come for the Melbourne-born Minogue, who got her first acting gig with small parts in Aussie dramas The Sullivans and Skyways before a starring role in The Henderson Kids.

In 1986 she joined the cast of Neighbours as mechanic Charlene Mitchell. Her TV wedding to co-star and real-life boyfriend Jason Donovan's character Scott Robinson attracted 20 million viewers worldwide when it aired in 1987.

A week later, her recording of Locomotion launched her music career, which is still going strong almost four decades later.

She has continued to take on the occasional acting role and returned to Neighbours in 2022 as a guest star on the show's final episode.

She has won numerous awards, including two Grammys, one of which was last year for Best Dance Pop Recording for Padam Padam.

Felix Cameron

As soon as it was announced that Trent Dalton's bestselling novel Boy Swallows Universe would be adapted for a limited series to be screened on Netflix, attention turned to who would play the role of a young Eli Bell.

Felix Cameron, a Melbourne-born child actor who had previously played one of three sons of Naomi Watts' character in the film Penguin Bloom, was cast as 13-year-old Eli Bell – one of three actors to play the role.

Filming began in August 2022, and the young star was soon blowing away director Bharat Nalluri with his talent, especially in one particularly tough scene.

"[He] walked on and did the scene in one take. It's an extraordinary scene," he said

"The performance is outstanding. It's so real. We literally did it in five minutes, wrapped and went home knowing we'd just witnessed something truly special."

The series was released to critical acclaim and Cameron received two Logie nominations in 2024, becoming the youngest winner of the Silver Logie for Best Lead Actor in a Drama.

He also became the youngest person to win two Logie awards when he took out the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent as well.

He has since been signed by a Hollywood agent, and has several new roles in the pipeline. 

Cherry Campbell

When producers were looking for a child to play the lead role in the screen adaptation of the beloved children's books, Katie Morag, they decided to hold a casting call followed by extensive auditions in both Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland.

The part eventually went to a seven-year-old Cherry Campbell, of Glasgow, whose grandmother was born and bred on the Isle of Lewis, which was chosen as the location for the fictional Scottish island of Struay, where the book was set.

Director Don Coutts said at the time, "We were looking for someone with energy, humour and courage to play the feisty wee character of Katie Morag and we think that Cherry has all three of these attributes in spades".

The first of the show's two seasons was met with critical acclaim, with Campbell also singled out for praise.

The Times wrote, "Draw the curtains, pour a whisky and enjoy one of the most realistic child performances of the decade..."

Campbell was just nine when in 2014 she became the youngest person to win a British Academy Children's Awards (now the BAFTA Children & Young People Awards) for Best Performance.

The series ended after two seasons. In the years since, she has appeared in several other TV roles.

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