They're like most survivors, who take an extended intermission that opens up options beyond their early lives. After getting a college education, Temple briefly returned to movies and had a TV show, but ultimately spent her adult life as a diplomat. Sills married and moved to Cleveland before returning as the star of the New York City Opera and then went on to run it. Diane Lane arrived as a star opposite Laurence Olivier in "A Little Romance" at 13 and came back as a character actor who seems able to do most anything.

Intermissions aren't always a matter of choice. What children do with openhearted instinctiveness sometimes has to be relearned more analytically in adulthood. Violinist Yehudi Menuhin performed long, emotionally complex works as a teenager in recordings that are still considered classics. Then came a crisis during which he wondered if he could play at all; he came back better than ever — but just for a while. And when he died at age 82 in 1999, he was beloved more as a humanitarian; for decades, he'd given haphazard, even disastrous performances that he somehow thought were transcendent. He talked about "gazing in my usual state of being half absent in my own world and half in the present. I have usually been able to 'retire' in this way."

There's also artistic survival vs. personal survival. One case history: Durbin and Garland got their start in the same 1936 movie, "Every Sunday"; both had amazing adult voices and ways of using them that seemed far beyond their chronological ages (15 and 14). Though Durbin saved Depression-era Universal Pictures from bankruptcy, she opted not to hang on. Success diminished and, after 1950, she left Hollywood to have a family. Now 87, she lives in France.

Garland was dead at 47 after a history of brilliant ups, embarrassing downs and lots of drugs. Sound like somebody more recently deceased?

But how is survival measured here? Legend has it that during one of her ups, Garland tracked down Durbin by phone, burbled on and on about her latest successes, only to have Durbin reply, "Are you still in that … industry?" Durbin got out alive. But Garland had an artistic flowering after 1950 that continues to enthrall audiences.

Was Garland's choice strictly about artistry? Ex-prodigies understandably can be at odds with reality, one symptom being their financial lives. Garland had chronic money problems, even at the height of her MGM movie fame. Unlike Durbin, she had to keep working and find new ways to fascinate her public. The famine-to-feast world of showbiz salaries always promises a quick fix (not that such wealth necessarily materializes).