Growing up isn't always easy, so imagine having to grow up on movie screens in front of an audience of millions. Sure, the money probably eases the burden... but we digress.

Watching the Harry Potter kids as Half-Blood Prince rolls out seems to reveal a relatively well-adjusted trio of stars who've avoided the pitfalls of celebrity life and kept their wits about them (though not always their clothes, as Daniel Radcliffe showed in his Equus theatre debut).

But how will the kids fare post-Potter? Will they transition successfully into adult roles? We decided to take a look back at 25 memorable child stars -- and the courses their careers took.

A 12-year-old couldn't ask for a cooler film debut than that of a gun-toting, Lolita-esque muse to a hardened New York hit man. In 1994's Leon, Natalie Portman gets to swear, smoke, wear hot pants and learn how to take out a target -- only Luc Besson would dare get away with it -- thus preparing herself for a successful adult career as the muse of a Sith Lord, a terrorist, and Devendra Banhart. But really, Natalie -- what the hell was with Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium?

Ah, Eddie. He burst onto screens wearing a Public Enemy T-shirt, robbing ATMs and teaching killer robots how to high five as the young k.d. Lang -- sorry, John Connor -- in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but the ensuing years have been anything but 'eeeasy money'. 1998's trio of Pecker, American History X and Detroit Rock City looked promising, but Furlong's battle with drugs sidelined his CV -- and meant we had to deal with Christian Bale as John Connor in Terminator Salvation. Uh, thanks for that. Still, at least Uwe Boll's giving him work.

There are those who'll insist Dakota was never really a child actress -- just an adult trapped in a miniature body. True, there's something eerily preternatural about her performances, even going back to 2001's I Am Sam -- when she was just seven -- and she was definitely too old to be playing with pigs and spiders in Charlotte's Web. But the world wasn't ready for Dakota to grow up, as the rape-gate controversy over the quickly-shelved Hounddog illustrated. Now, she's ready for proper young adult, starring in Twilight: New Moon, and as proto-punk '70s riot grrl Cherie Currie in The Runaways. Hello daddy, hello mom...

To be fair, Linda Blair was never going to live up to -- or live down -- her portrayal of The Exorcist's Regan, a... 'troubled'... child given to decorating her bedroom with projectile vomit, descending staircases upside-down, and telling men of the cloth exactly what their mothers liked to suck in Hell. Her roller-skating teenage return in the train wreck Exorcist II quickly gave way to a rut of straight-to-video B-movies in the 1980s, while she later spoofed her most famous role with 1990's Repossessed!, resurfaced for a cameo in Wes Craven's Scream, and recently appeared in an episode of TV's Supernatural. Fitting enough.

Teenage growth spurts can be painful at the best of times, but when your awkward years are captured in a police mugshot for a DUI, it's all the worse. That 2006 photo of Haley Joel Osment's post-car accident arrest stunned everyone who remembered him as the silent, ethereal little boy who saw dead people in The Sixth Sense, played a creepy kinder-droid in Spielberg's A.I. and then, well... it's not that HJO disappeared exactly, but did anyone see Home of the Giants? He's only 21, so let's give his body time to align and then we'll see where he goes...