Vincent Winter

I’ve said for years that there needs to be a class in Hollywood taught by people like Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster on how to go from being a child star to being something else. I’ve also said that the class needs to include people who don’t go on to become, you know, Kurt Russell or Jodie Foster. People who become Just Working Actors, or even accountants. Something about how to transition from being an adorable screen moppet or whatever to being an adult. Vincent Winter was never a star; you almost certainly don’t even remember his roles, much less his name. But he was a child actor who went on to work on some of the biggest films of all time in a way where you never saw his face.

He was, unsurprisingly for a child actor—and someone I’m covering—in the Disney system. I’m most familiar with him from The Three Lives of Thomasina, where he’s the eldest of the random Scottish kids who are friends with Mary McDhui, Thomasina’s owner. It was his final role. It came ten years after his first role, in the United Artists film The Kidnappers, also released as The Little Kidnappers. He also appeared in Gorgo, the British Godzilla ripoff, and a total of four things for Disney, of which I’ve also covered Almost Angels.

And then at sixteen, the boy who had in his very first role won one of the special juvenile Oscars they used to give out got tired of the roles he was being offered and just stopped. I don’t have any information about his schooling from my usual sources, but I hope there, you know, was some. There’s a gap of five years between his last acting credit and his first credit in the category “Second Unit or Assistant Director,” one of the categories we know to be incomplete most of the time. He is listed as Third Assistant Director (uncredited) on Anthony Mann’s final film, A Dandy in Aspic.

He spent most of the ‘70s working as assistant director on things, some of which is familiar but most of which is not. He was even assistant director on the movie initially known as Unidentified Flying Oddball. He also worked on Labyrinth in that capacity, and his final job as assistant director was on an episode of Magnum, PI, which is how I learned that there’s an episode of Magnum, PI set in England. Before that, however, he worked as assistant director on Superman, which I suspect neatly led into his third career.

Arguably his most notable career, in fact. He became a production manager, which is another one of those places I assume IMDb to be incomplete. But his first job there is Superman II. And again, you won’t have heard of all the movies he did, though I’ve seen most of them. But there’s a little film on the list called The Color Purple. Maybe Henry V. Or perhaps Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And, okay, Santa Claus. Still. It’s quite the resume for a third career. Meaning he has three careers worthy of inclusion in this column, which very few people can say.