Shirley Temple

Shirley Jane Temple was born on April 23, 1928 in Santa Monica, California. As soon as she learned to walk, she began to receive dance classes. She was already capable of executing ballet choreography at the age of 3, when she made her big screen debut with Kid’s Last Stand , although the film with which she achieved fame was Stand Up and Cheer , a musical starring Warner Baxter . She signed a contract with Fox, a company that did not hesitate to take advantage of the good acceptance of her little girl, placing her at the forefront of numerous titles, such as Left in Pledge, where she was a girl who was left by her father as a sign of a gambling debt to various gamblers. One of them, Sorrowful Jones, takes care of the girl and ends up becoming fond of her. He played this character Adolphe Menjou , one of the most famous actors of the time, who had trouble during a take to say a sentence that he had choked on. They say that the small but clever Shirley Temple approached the director and asked him if it was too late to replace Menjou in the film.

Another of his best titles is The Little Colonel , where he manages to win the affection of his grandfather ( Lionel Barrymore ), a curmudgeonly colonel of the southern army, who had stopped talking to the girl’s mother, for marrying a soldier from the north. . Temple chained the shooting of kind films that brightened the day for the spectators, in the hard years of the Great Depression, such as The Little Princess , The Nice Little Orphan , Poor Rich Girl , Rebel and Heidi , adaptation of the famous novel by Johanna Spyri . She was directed by John Ford himself , in Wee Willie Winkie andThe regiment’s mascot , two minor titles by the filmmaker, who returned to the actress for Fort Apache , one of his great films.

Another of the great directors of the time, Henry Hathaway , directed Temple in Now and Forever , with Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard , a couple of swindlers who begin to regenerate when he has to take care of the girl, who was his daughter. She was shooting at such a fast pace that logically she did not have a conventional childhood. “My childhood ended at the age of five, when I went to see Santa Claus in a shopping center and he asked me if he could give him an autograph,” explained the actress. Although she has stated that she was a happy child, it is said that unorthodox tactics were used on her at times. It is rumored that once when she had to cry in a sequence, she was told that her mother had died.

She was such a popular girl that dolls with her image sold like hotcakes. At the 1934 Oscars ceremony, she was presented with a special award for her contribution to the world of entertainment. She passed on the opportunity to star in Metro’s The Wizard of Oz , but Fox refused to cede the young actress, so in the end she was replaced by the unforgettable Judy Garland . Fox began to worry because when Shirley became a teenager, the box office began to suffer, so they did not know what type of productions they should have her in. “I was the oldest fourteen-year-old girl in the world,” Temple recalls.

At the end of the 40s, she retired from the cinema, although for a long time she presented some television programs or appeared as a guest in others. She also exercised various diplomatic tasks.