Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple was once voted the 38th Greatest Movie Star of All Time by Entertainment Weekly. This is pretty impressive considering her last movie was released the year she turned 21. Not to mention the fact that as an adult she went on to make a run for Congress, and later was a delegate to the United Nations and served as ambassador to and .
On April 23, 1928, in Santa Monica, California, Temple was born to banker George Francis Temple and Gertrude Amelia Krieger. While attending a dance class at just 3 years old, Temple was discovered by a visiting director. Over the next two years, she filmed a number of short films for Educational Pictures. While filming the shorts, Temple also filmed some regular movies, including Stand Up and Cheer! with James Dunn. Getting this additional notice helped her to be signed by Fox Film Corporation, which later merged with 20th Century Pictures, becoming 20th Century Fox.
It was the movie Bright Eyes that included Black’s most famous song and dance, On the Good Ship Lollipop. This song became very popular on the radio, as well as few other Temple film numbers, such as Animal Crackers in My Soup and Goodnight My Love. Her dancing ability was so advanced for a girl of such a young age, that she was often paired up with dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and appeared with him in the movies, The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Just Around the Corner. Yet because this was back in the 1930s, states in the South didn’t look too kindly on an African-American man holding holds with Temple . Because of this, those scenes were edited out for that region.
Temple was said to always be a complete professional, always knowing her lines, lyrics to her songs, and dance steps in such movies as Curly Sue, Little Miss Marker, and Poor Little Rich Girl. Her professionalism served her well, as she was ranked the top box office star. In 1935, she earned the very first Juvenile Performer Academy Award, and later was the youngest person to ever to be memorialized with hand and foot prints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
20th Century Fox wasn’t willing to part with Temple to film Wizard of Oz for MGM, so the part of Dorothy was given to a much older Judy Garland. Age was always an important factor with Temple ’s roles, so to keep her youth a little longer, her birth certificate was altered. She didn’t know about this until she turned 13, thinking she was actually turning 12. As a teenager, she attended Westlake School for Girls, yet kept making movies, filming The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.
Temple married John Agar was she was just 17, and they had a child together in 1948. One year later Temple retired from the movies, and divorced Agar in 1950. A short time later, she met businessman Charles Alden Black while she was in Hawaii on vacation. She has claimed since then it was love at first sight. In December of that year, they were married, and went on to have two children together. In the late 50s and early 60s, Temple made a return to entertainment, lending her name to the television series Shirley Temple’s Storybook, that featured a different fairy tale each week. Occasionally she filmed narrator or acting roles for the show.
It was after this last foray into entertainment that Temple turned to politics. After an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1967, President Richard Nixon appointed her a delegate to the United Nations. In 1974 she was appointed ambassador to , and when that term was done, Temple became the Chief of Protocol of the . In 1989 she became the ambassador to , and in 1999 she became a breast cancer survivor. Yet, throughout such a productive career of dancing, acting, hosting, and politics, it‘s Temple’s ambassadorship to Czechoslovakia that she considers her best job ever. |
