Shirley Temple, one of the most popular movie stars during the Great Depression before she even turned 10, has died. She was 85-years-old.
Temple died Monday night at her Woodside, Calif. home with her friends and family at her side. Her death was confirmed in a statement by her agent. Her nephew, Richard Black, told The Hollywood Reporter that she had been in a hospice.
The little girl with the perfect gold ringlets became a movie sensation during the early 1930s in the darkest days of the Great Depression. She was just 6 years old when she was given an honorary Oscar, notes The New York Times. She was the biggest star at Twentieth Century Fox, keeping the studio alive and out of bankruptcy. She had appeared in 46 feature films by the time she was 13 and was an even bigger star that the King of movies, Clark Gable.
Temple is still the youngest person to receive any kind of Oscar. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences recognized her “in grateful recognition of her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment during the year 1934.”
Her best year might have been 1935, in which she starred in Our Little Girl, Curly Top, The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel.
However, by the end of the decade, she started growing up and Fox let her go after two flops in 1940. MGM did want to cast her in The Wizard of Oz, but Fox would not loan her out and Dorothy Gale went to Judy Garland.
Still, as a teenager in the 1940s, Temple continued to give enchanting performances. She appeared in 1944’s Since You Went Away, which centered on the women at home during the war; 1946’s Fort Apache, a Western directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne; and 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, a raucous comedy in which she played a schoolgirl infatuated with Cary Grant.
After leaving show business, Temple became active in the Republican Party. In 1967, she ran for Congress, although was not elected. President Richard Nixon did appoint her a special envoy to the UN and she served as an ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
“When I was 3 years old, I was delighted to be told that I was an actress, even though I didn’t know what an actress was,” Temple said when she picked up the lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild in 2006. “I have one piece of advice for those of you who want to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award: Start early!”
Temple also told her life story in 1988’s Child Star.
Temple was born on April 23, 1928. She married John Agar when she was just 17 in 1945. They divorced in 1949 and had one child, Linda. In 1950, she met her second husband, Charles Black, with whom she had two children, Charles and Lori. Charles Black died in 2005 and Temple is survived by her three children.
image: Wikimedia Commons
