Christian Charles Philip Bale, after being born in 1974, made his professional debut on the London West End stage, playing opposite beloved "Blackadder" comic Rowan Atkinson. American audiences first got a good look at Bale, the most gripping child actor since Jackie Coogan, when he beat out 4,000 other kids to star in Steven Spielberg's unregenerate, hugely overbudgeted, over-art-directed, hyper-sentimentalized sob-mop, "Empire of the Sun" (1987), where he plays a preadolescent boy separated from his parents in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation in World War II.

He's really, really good, and there is no need for the "for a kid" caveat -- when he loses his mother in a bustling mob and screams for her; when his face registers the discoveries of lust, betrayal, cataclysmic loss and various fugue states in between, it is clear that we are dealing with a freak of nature. This is no mere child actor; this is a kid who knows how to act as well as most 50-year-olds in the Royal Shakespeare Company -- the kind of preternatural, precocious talent that suggests a boy that has lived human lives and done this kind of thing before.

He successfully captures a sophisticated nuance of being traumatized but still being a kid; having long stretches of forgetting he's traumatized by being distracted by his kid instincts -- mucking around, collecting cool trinkets, horseplaying at survival. He is at times a beautiful, innocent child and at times properly annoying. He shows that he can both act cool and lose his cool. He loses his mind and he finds it again. It's an undeniable tour de force; the National Board of Review created the Best Performance by a Juvenile Actor award to laud the performance. I'm not sure how he avoided getting sucked down the Macaulay Culkin rabbit hole or otherwise dodged an insane amount of toxic overexposure after "Empire," but he must have had marvelous parents and/or management.

Shortly after this, Bale was Falstaff's "Boy" in Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" (1989). It's not a big part but one that spikes the already heady emotional punch -- he's the angel-faced darling young lad whose unjust slaying, in the war, drives Branagh's Henry to wild, salivic fits of sky-ripping poesy; his bloody, limp young body is toted around like a grief-promoting handbag by Branagh in the final scenes.

"Newsies" (1992) is an incredibly strange, perversely commercial, yet weirdly compelling Disney musical, largely ripped off from "Oliver Twist," that involves dancing, singing pre-pubescent orphan newsboys in turn-of the-century New York organizing against child-labor abuses by the Big Newspaper. Bale plays Jack Kelly, the Artful Dodger re-imagined as a union-organizing Bowery Boy.

Another spooky thing that proves Bale is something slightly beyond human is that he does not ever appear to have had any awkward adolescent period. He always looks perfectly like himself, perfectly proportional, just smaller or larger. Which is not to say he's perfect. He's not. His eyes and mouth sometimes hang ridiculously open like that of an excited collie; when he smiles, it looks like his tongue is hanging out, just a little.

In this film, Bale should by all rights look ridiculous -- like poncing, mincing, homo-boy bait, a mass-produced Twinkie cake. The role of Jack Kelly should have been enough to turn stomachs, alienate his fan base, and kill his career for several years. I can't really figure out how he does it, but he emerges from even this wild embarrassment smelling like a rose. How? How can Bale sing wussy songs about having "no muddah or faddah," on artificial cobblestones, clutching a prop-room wagon wheel and pirouetting in musical numbers so sellout-sational they make "Mary Poppins" look like a freebase weekend with Bob Fosse, and still look great? How can he be that emotionally exposed, in a project so Disney-twee it could only be considered an artistic success by 11-year-old girls and pedophiles, without ever looking twitted-out and dickless?

I will tell you.

There is something that great stars like Cary Grant and Michael Caine have: the elusive Common Touch, which makes their divine gifts non-alienating to the less fortunate. How does one recognize the Common Touch in a star?

I have devised a fail-safe, if vulgar, test: Can you easily picture him shitting his pants?

With Bale, the answer is a resounding yes -- you can also picture him becoming wildly frustrated by the parking valet or sticking his elbow in the gravy boat. He's human, in every beautiful, fucked-up sense of the word. He wears all the inconveniences and embarrassments of being alive very openly. He also lays a kiss on his teen co-star at the end that is so surprisingly salacious I'm surprised it didn't boost the film to a PG-13.

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