Haley Joel Osment Biography

Haley Joel Osment (born April 10, 1988) is an Academy Award-nominated American child actor, perhaps best known for his role in the 1999 film The Sixth Sense.

Biography

Haley Joel Osment was born in Los Angeles, California to Eugene Osment and Theresa Seifert. He began acting at the age of four, when he tried out for a Pizza Hut commercial in a shopping mall. The commercial launched his career, and he landed his first television role later that year. As a younger 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), Murphy Brown, and most notably The Jeff Foxworthy Show. Osment has a younger sister, Emily Osment, born March 10, 1992.

Osment 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). Osment then 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. He has since appeared in several films, including Pay It Forward and Secondhand Lions. Osment also provided the voice for Sora, the main protagonist of The Walt Disney Company and Square-Enix's Kingdom Hearts series of video games. He starred in Bogus alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Gérard Depardieu.

Haley portrayed Dylan Hydecker in the 1998 made-for-TV movie The Lake with Yasmine Bleeth.

One of Haley Joel Osment's lines in The Sixth Sense, "I see dead people," is often repeated on television programs and subject of a number of puns in the Blizzard game Warcraft 3 (i.e one undead creature says "I eat dead people"). He attributes his success as an actor to his parents.

Haley Joel Osment currently resides in Los Angeles, California with his parents and sister, Emily (four years his junior), who is also an actress. He is a student at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada, California.