Martin Stephens

Martin Stephens is an English former child actor who acted in films during the 1950s and 1960s before becoming an architect. Born in Southgate, Middlesex, he made his screen debut at five in the 1954 drama The Divided Heart and portrayed David Copperfield as a boy in three episodes of Tales from Dickens. In Another Time, Another Place (1958) he played the son of Glynis Johns and Sean Connery. His most famous part came in Village of the Damned (1960), drawn from John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos, as David Zellaby, who leads a band of unsettling hybrid children; the modestly budgeted film grew into a word-of-mouth hit. He followed it as the knowing Miles in The Innocents (1961), adapted from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. After time away for his education he returned in The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, and his last screen role was in the Hammer film The Witches (1966).