Great Depression singing and dancing icon Shirley Temple passed away Monday at the age of 85, and all of cinema remembers.
Shirley Temple Black, America’s favorite sweetheart dimples during the Depression, passed away this Monday. She was 85.
A family spokesman said in a statement, “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 of fifty-five years.”
Shirley Temple Black, or simply Shirley Temple as she will always be known through the immortality of black and white celluloid, is remembered by movie lovers as the precocious innocence whose singing and tap dancing brought joy to millions of Americans during one of this country’s darkest decade-long hours. Between 1934 and 1940, she starred in 24 films before she even reached the ripe old age of 13. During that period, she toe tapped into cinema’s heart via “The Good Ship Lollipop” in Bright Eyes (1934), “When I Grow Up” in Curly Top (1935), and “Swing Me an Old-Fashioned Song” in Little Miss Broadway (1938), amongst others. Some of her most famous roles also included The Little Colonel (1935), The Little Princess (1939), and Just Around the Corner (1938). Adolphe Menjou, Temple’s singing co-star in her first star vehicle Little Miss Marker (1934), famously quipped that she was “an Ethel Barrymore at 6” and was making him look the stooge.
During that era, Temple received more fan mail than Greta Garbo, was photographed more often than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and was considered America’s favorite movie star—sorry Fred, Ginger, Clark, and Cary. Her fame was so overpowering that the Academy Awards’ ruling Board of Governors bestowed a special “lifetime achievement” award called the “Academy Juvenile Award” for outstanding performances from actors under the age of 18. It was first awarded in 1935 to Shirley Temple at the age of 6, despite only staring yet in two films (though she appeared in a total of eight movies in 1934).
As she got older, Temple appeared less and less frequently in feature films, all but retiring from the business in 1949, save for a short-lived television series, Shirley Temple’s Storybook, which aired on NBC between 1958 and 1961.
However, Temple would have great success past the once-adoring movie house, as she became a prominent Republican fundraiser after marrying Charles Alden Black in 1950. President Richard Nixon appointed her as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 1969, and she would earn international respect for her role as U.S. ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976 under the Gerald Ford Administration. She also was Ford’s chief of protocol from 1976 to 1977. She later served in President H.W. Bush’s Administration as U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the tumultuous transition for the Eastern bloc, as it shook off communism in 1989. In Czechoslovakia, it was called the “Velvet Revolution” by November of that year.
Shirley Temple Black always remained levelheaded despite earning $3 million by 1939. She remained as such throughout her personal life, overcoming a bout of breast cancer very visibly in 1972 when she held a news conference during a period where such procedures were viewed with suspicion.
Personally, I will always fondly remember her for her appearance in Fort Apache (1948). Shot when Temple was 19, she was attempting to be more starlet than star, and provided a lovely even-handed energy as Miss Philadelphia Thursday to the classic John Ford machismo picture that was otherwise the battle of wills between a Custard-like Henry Fonda and a surprisingly progressive John Wayne, just as an Apache apocalypse for all was imminent.
Shirley Temple Black is survived by her children Susan, Charlie Jr., and Lori, her granddaughter Teresa, and her great-granddaughters Lily and Emma.
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