Martin Stephens

On January 4, 2017 Stephens gave an extensive interview on his career as a child actor during a TEDx episode titled 'Movies, Marriage and Meditation'.

Stephens' eerily chilling performance as a calm and controlling white-haired child without the capacity to feel any human emotion both thrilled and disturbed audiences, leaving a lasting impression on those who saw it. In 2003, English broadcaster Alan Dein noted: "Children were your friends, they were fun. But not this lot. This was the first time any of us had ever seen scary children, really bad seeds, and he was the scariest of the lot. That boy gave me nightmares." Stephens himself recalled: "I knew it was an unusual part. I quietly liked it...having these very adult qualities and having control over the adult. Imagine having that power."

His final film appearance came in the indifferently-received Hammer Films production The Witches in 1966.

Stephens returned to the screen in 1965, as one of the two siblings, the other played by Olivia Hussey, who travel from England to Italy to bring home their errant mother (Maureen O'Hara) in The Battle of the Villa Fiorita.

In 1961, Stephens appeared in a smaller part in The Hellfire Club before landing another starring role in The Innocents, a screen version of the famously ambiguous Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw. Cast as the precocious and strangely knowing Miles, he gave another unsettling performance as a disturbed and prematurely sexualised child, notably in the famous "goodnight kiss" scene with Deborah Kerr. This proved to be Stephens' last film for several years, as his parents withdrew him from acting to concentrate on his education. He later said: "It was just accepted wisdom within my family: boarding school and the end of the acting career. I was a very malleable child. Which is probably why I was reasonably good in films, because I was very directable."

Martin Stephens (born 15 July 1949) is a former child actor and architect from England, best known for his performances in the films Village of the Damned and The Innocents.

Stephens was born in Southgate, Middlesex in 1949 and made his first film appearance aged 5 in the 1954 tug-of-love drama The Divided Heart. In 1958 he featured as the young David Copperfield in three episodes of the TV series Tales from Dickens. The same year he returned to the screen in Another Time, Another Place, a sudsy melodrama in which he was cast as the child of Sean Connery and Glynis Johns.