Shirley Temple, adored little star, dies at 85

Shirley Temple Black accepts the life-achievement award at the 12th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles on Jan. 29, 2006. Black died Monday at the age of 85.

Shirley Temple Black accepts the life-achievement award at the 12th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles on Jan. 29, 2006. Black died Monday at the age of 85.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Shirley Temple Black, who as a dimpled, precocious and determined little girl in the 1930s sang and tap-danced her way to a height of Hollywood stardom and worldwide fame that no other child has reached, died Monday night at her home in Woodside, Calif. She was 85.

Her publicist, Cheryl Kagan, confirmed her death.

Black returned to the spotlight in the 1960s in the role of diplomat, but in the popular imagination she would always be America’s darling of the Depression years, when in 23 motion pictures her sparkling personality and sunny optimism lifted spirits and made her famous.

From 1935 to 1939 she was the most popular movie star in America, with Clark Gable a distant second. She received more mail than Greta Garbo and was photographed more often than President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The little girl with 56 perfect blond ringlets and an air of relentless determination was so precocious that the usually unflappable Adolphe Menjou, her co-star in her first big hit, Little Miss Marker, described her as “an Ethel Barrymore at 6” and said she was “making a stooge out of me.”

When she turned from a child into a teenager, audience interest slackened, and she retired from the screen at22. But instead of retreating into nostalgia, she created a successful second career for herself.

After marrying Charles Alden Black in 1950, she became a prominent Republican fundraiser. She was appointed as a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly by President Richard Nixon in 1969.

She went on to win wide respect as the U.S. ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976, was President Gerald Ford’s chief of protocol in 1976 and 1977, and became President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989, serving there during the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

Shirley Jane Temple was born in Santa Monica, Calif., on April 23, 1928. From the beginning, she and her mother, Gertrude, were a team; her movie career was their joint invention. Her success was due to her own charm and her mother’s persistence.

In Child Star, her 1988 autobiography, Black said her mother had made a “calculated decision” to turn her only daughter into a professional dancer. At a fee of 50 cents a week, her mother enrolled 3-year-old Shirley in Mrs. Meglin’s Dance Studio.

Her career began in earnest in 1934, when she was picked to play James Dunn’s daughter in the Fox fantasy Stand Up and Cheer, one of many films made during the Depression in which music chases away unhappy reality. She was signed to a two-week contract at $150 a week and told to provide her own tap shoes.

No Shirley Temple movie was complete without a song - most famously “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and “Animal Crackers in My Soup” - and a tap dance, with partners including George Murphy, Jack Haley and Buddy Ebsen.

But her most successful partnership was with the legendary black entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. She may have been the first white actress allowed to hold hands affectionately with a black man on screen, and her staircase dance with Robinson in The Little Colonel, the first of four movies they made together, retains its magic almost 80 years later.

By the mid-1940s her golden hair had turned brown, and, as film historian David Thomson observed, she had become “an unremarkable teenager.” The public had lost interest.

After winning an honorary Academy Award at the age of 6 and earning $3 million before puberty, Shirley Temple grew up to be a level-headed adult.When her cancerous left breast was removed in 1972, at a time when operations for cancer were shrouded in secrecy, she held a news conference in her hospital room to speak out about her mastectomy and to urge women discovering breast lumps not to “sit home and be afraid.” She is widely credited with helping to make it acceptable to talk about breast cancer.

A statement released by her family said, “We salute her for a life of remarkable achievements as an actor, as a diplomat, and most importantly as our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and adored wife for 55 years of the late and much missed Charles Alden Black.”

Black and her husband had a son, Charles Alden Jr., and a daughter, Lori Alden.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/12/2014