Haley Joel Osment

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Haley Joel Osment (born April 10, 1988) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor. After a series of roles in television and film during the early 1990s, Osment came to fame with his starring role in the 1999 thriller, The Sixth Sense. He subsequently had leading roles in several high-profile Hollywood films, including Pay It Forward and A.I., and Secondhand Lions. He is also notable for providing the voice of Sora, the protagonist in the Kingdom Hearts series, one of the most high-profile video game series to make heavy use of voice acting. And he played the voice of Beary Barrington in Disney and Jim Henson's Creature Shop's The Country Bears.

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Osment began acting at the age of four, when he tried out for a Pizza Hut commercial. The commercial launched his career, and he landed his first television role later that year. As a young child, he played Forrest Gump's son, also named Forrest Gump, in the 1994 film of the same name. He had roles in numerous TV series, including Walker, Texas Ranger (as a child dying from AIDS), Thunder Alley, The Jeff Foxworthy Show, The Pretender, and most notably the final season of Murphy Brown, in which he replaced Dylan Christopher as Murphy's son Avery. He also played a dying child in the emotional episode "Angels and Blimps" of the late-1990s show Ally McBeal.

Osment starred in Bogus alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Gérard Depardieu, and appeared in the 1998 made-for-TV movie The Lake with Yasmine Bleeth, as well as I'll Remember April with future The Sixth Sense co-star Trevor Morgan. He first achieved stardom in 1999 when he appeared in the blockbuster The Sixth Sense, co-starring Bruce Willis. For this role, he won the Saturn Award for best young actor. He was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Michael Caine (whom he would later star alongside in Secondhand Lions). One of Osment's lines in The Sixth Sense, "I see dead people" is often repeated or parodied on television programs and in other media. For example, one creature in the Blizzard game Warcraft 3 says, "I eat dead people".

The 2000 Academy Awards ceremony honored another future co-star, Best Actor Kevin Spacey, who, along with Helen Hunt, appeared in Osment's next film, Pay It Forward. The following year, he appeared in Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, cementing his stature as one of the leading young actors in Hollywood. This role got him his second Saturn Award. Also in 2001, Osment starred in a Polish film, Edges of the Lord, as Romek. The movie was never released theatrically in the United States. He has since provided voices for The Country Bears and Jungle Book 2, and returned to live action with the 2003 film Secondhand Lions.

More recently, Osment became the voice of Sora, the main protagonist of The Walt Disney Company and Square-Enix's Kingdom Hearts video game series, which has been extremely financially successful as well as generally well-received critically. He is also the voice of Takeshi Jin, the main character of the Immortal Grand Prix anime TV series.

Osment's next film will be Home of the Giants, playing a high school journalist opposite Ryan Merriman and Danielle Panabaker.

Osment has confirmed in an interview that he will star in two new films in 2007.

Links

 * Haley Joel Osment website
 * Haley Joel Osment website