Born to be a star

SHIRLEY TEMPLE was the dimpled, curly-haired child star who sang, danced, sobbed and grinned her way into the hearts of Depressionera moviegoers.

Temple, known in private life as Shirley Temple Black, was the US’ top box-office draw from 1935 to 1938, a record no other child star has come near. She beat such grown-ups as Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford.

In 1999, the American Film Institute’s list of the top 25 female screen legends ranked Temple 18th. She appeared in scores of movies and kept children singing On The Good Ship Lollipop for generations.

Temple was credited with helping save 20th Century Fox from bankruptcy with films such as Curly Top and The Littlest Rebel.

She blossomed into a pretty young woman, but audiences lost interest, and she retired from films at 21. She raised a family and later became active in politics and held several diplomatic posts in Republican administrations, including ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the collapse of communism in 1989.

“I have one piece of advice for those of you who want to receive the lifetime achievement award. Start early,” she said in 2006 as she was honoured by the Screen Actors Guild.

She also said that evening that her greatest roles were as wife, mother and grandmother, and added: “There’s nothing like real love.

Nothing.”

Her husband of more than 50 years, Charles Black, died only a few months ago.

TEMPLE’S expert singing and tap dancing in the 1934 feature Stand Up And Cheer!

first gained her wide notice. The number she performed with future Oscar winner James Dunn, Baby Take A Bow, became the title of one of her first starring features later that year.

Also in 1934, she starred in Little Miss Marker, a comedy-drama based on a story by Damon Runyon that showcased her acting talent. In Bright Eyes, Temple introduced On The Good Ship Lollipop.

She was “just absolutely marvellous, greatest in the world”, director Allan Dwan said, adding: “You’d just tell her once and she would remember. Whatever it was she was supposed to do, she’d do it. And if one of the actors got stuck, she’d tell him what his line was – she knew it better than he did.”

Temple’s mother, Gertrude, worked to keep her daughter from being spoiled by fame and was a constant presence during filming. Her daughter said years later that her mother had been furious when a director once sent her on an errand and then got Temple to cry for a scene by frightening her. “She never again left me alone on a set,” she said.

Temple became a nationwide sensation.

Mothers dressed their little girls like her, and a line of dolls was launched that are now highly sought-after collectables. Her immense popularity prompted President Franklin D Roosevelt to say that “as long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right”.

“When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles,” Roosevelt said.

However, her career meant she missed out on a normal childhood. She stopped believing in Santa Claus aged six when: “Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.”

SHE followed up in the next few years with a string of hit films, most with sentimental themes and musical subplots.

She often played an orphan, as in Curly Top, and Stowaway.

She teamed with the great black dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in two 1935 films with Civil War themes, The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel. Their tap dance up the steps in The Little Colonel (at a time when interracial teamings were unheard of in Hollywood) became a landmark in the history of film dance.

Some of her pictures were remakes of silent films, such as Captain January, in which she recreated the role originally played by the silent star Baby Peggy Montgomery in 1924.

Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm, done a generation earlier by Mary Pickford, were heavily rewritten for Temple, with showbiz added to the plots to give her opportunities to sing.

She won a special Academy Award in early 1935 for her “outstanding contribution to screen entertainment”

in the previous year.

“She is a legacy of a different time in motion pictures. She caught the imagination of the entire country in a way that no one had before,”

actor Martin Landau said when the two were honoured at the Academy Awards in 1998.

On her eighth birthday – she was actually turning nine, but the studio wanted her to be younger – Temple received more than 135,000 presents from around the world, including a baby kangaroo from Australia and a prize Jersey calf from schoolchildren in Oregon.

“She’s indelible in the history of America because she appeared at a time of great social need, and people took her to their hearts,” the late Roddy McDowall, a fellow child star and friend, once said.

Although by the early 1960s she was retired from the entertainment industry, her interest in politics brought her back into the spotlight.

She made an unsuccessful bid as a Republican candidate for Congress in 1967. After Richard Nixon became president in 1969, he appointed her as a member of the US delegation to the UN. In the 1970s, she was US ambassador to Ghana and later US chief of protocol.

She then served as ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the administration of the first President Bush. A few months after she arrived in Prague in mid-1989, communist rule was overthrown in Czechoslovakia as the Iron Curtain collapsed across Eastern Europe.

“My main job (initially) was human rights, trying to keep people like future president Vaclav Havel out of jail,” she said. Within months, she was accompanying Mr Havel, the former dissident playwright, when he came to Washington as his country’s new president.

She considered her background in entertainment an asset to her political career.

“Politicians are actors too, don’t you think?”

she once said. “Usually, if you like people and you’re outgoing, not a shy little thing, you can do pretty well in politics.”