by Jenna GuillaumeBuzzFeedBuzzFeed Contributor

Content warning: this post mentions child abuse, sexual assault, drug and alcohol addiction, and eating disorders.

Many child stars don't have easy lives, even today — but back when the screen industry was in its early years and there were basically no protections for any actors, let alone children, child stars often endured truly horrifying treatment. Here are some of the revelations that came out about classic Hollywood child stars after they were all grown up...

Shirley Temple is perhaps the most famous child star of all time, starring in movies when she was just three years old. In her memoir Child Star, Shirley described how she and other child actors were disciplined for misbehaving on set by being forced to sit in a dark sound booth on a block of ice.

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"They had two sound boxes on our set. One of them had a big cake of ice in it, and when any of us misbehaved, we were sent one by one into the black box to cool off and think about it. In the dark, with the door closed," Shirley said. "I got a lot of earaches, I got a lot of styes, I got a lot of problems from that. I was in the box several times."

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Shirley also addressed the way she was often sexualized on screen, calling some of her early work "a cynical exploitation of our childish innocence." She was also allegedly abused off-screen, claiming in her memoir that MGM producer Arthur Freed exposed himself to her during a private meeting when she was 11 years old.

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Shirley also described a distressing encounter with producer David O. Selznick when she was 17, alleging he locked her in his office and chased her around the furniture. She said she avoided "passionate clumsiness" thanks to having "the agility of a young dancer."

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Jackie Coogan was THE original Hollywood child star, getting his start in silent movies, including the titular role in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid when he was five. He was one of the first screen stars to be heavily merchandised, with his name branded on everything from clothes and dolls to peanut butter and toothbrushes, and he set a record for what was then, in the 1920s, the largest movie salary ever — $500,000 from MGM. He also dedicated time and money to charity, raising money and collecting food and clothes for refugee children.

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When he reached adulthood, Jackie discovered his parents hadn't set up the trust for him that they promised they had, and, after his father's death, a legal battle ensued with his mother that led to the revelation that all that was left of his millions of dollars in earnings was $252,000, half of which his mother was entitled to due to the conditions of their settlement. Years later, he said all he actually got was, "$35,000, which included cashing in my life insurance policy."

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Jackie's experience led to the creation of the Coogan Law, the first step in protecting child stars' earnings. As an adult, he is best known for playing Uncle Fester in the original The Addams Family TV series, work which he "loved" but which he also struggled with, according to his daughter, who said he once came home crying, saying, "I used to be the most beautiful child in the world and now I’m a hideous monster."

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Jackie Cooper got his big break in the Our Gang series before becoming the youngest person ever nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for his role in Skippy when he was nine. Jackie later revealed that, to get him to cry effectively on camera, Skippy director Norman Taurog (who was married to Jackie's aunt) tried a number of cruel tactics, including dressing another child actor in Jackie's costume to suggest he'd be replaced, and telling Jackie his dog (which was on set) would be shot — even going so far as to have a security guard take the dog away and fire a pistol out of sight, leading Jackie to believe the dog had been killed.

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Jackie described harsh treatment from a lot of the adults he worked with, as well as his own grandmother, who would hit and pinch him. He also wasn't allowed to do normal childhood things like roller skate or ride a bike. In his autobiography Please Don't Shoot My Dog, Jackie wrote, "Later, people tried to rationalize to me that I had gained more than I lost by being a child star... But no amount of rationalization, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses – what I lost – when a normal childhood is abandoned for an early movie career."

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When he was just 17, Joan Crawford — then in her mid-30s — took Jackie's virginity and went on to maintain a six-month "affair" with him, which he later described as very ritualized, involving a strict schedule and routine in which Joan bathed and "powdered" him.

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Shocking Secrets About Old Hollywood Child Stars