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Shirley Temple Black, who as the most popular child movie star of all time lifted a filmgoing nation’s spirits during the Depression and then grew up to be a diplomat, has died. She was 85.
Black died late Monday at her home in the San Francisco suburb of Woodside, according to publicist Cheryl Kagan. No cause was given.
Shirley Temple still holds the record for being the youngest actress ever to win an Oscar at the age of six.
She was such a hit that US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt dubbed her “Little Miss Miracle” for raising morale during the Great Depression and she was credited with helping save 20th Century Fox from bankruptcy.
Temple starred in a total of 43 feature films – but found it difficult to sustain her career in adulthood and left acting behind in 1950. She was often impersonated in comedy sketches singing her famous song “On the Good Ship Lollipop” from the Film “Bright Eyes”.
Temple continued to make films into her teenage years but she found making movies difficult as an adult and in 1950 she quit the acting business at the ripe old age of twenty two. It was also in 1950 that she married Charles Alden Black, a WWII United States Navy intelligence officer and became known as Shirley Temple Black. She had a short run with a television career but she was destined to go into a life of politics and ran as a Republican candidate for Congress in 1967 but lost. Determined to carry on, she became a member of the US delegation to the United Nations General Assembly before being offered the post of US ambassador to Ghana in 1974. By 1989, she was appointed US ambassador to Czechoslovakia
This sounds like a great idea for a movie biography…I think there was a movie in 2001 that nobody watched. The time is probably right to make a decent tribute film to such a great lady.
Shirley Temple 1928 to 2014.
Agencies/Canadajournal
