Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple[1] (1928-2014) is arguably the most famous child actress in film history.
She was very popular during the desperate times of The Great Depression, but those viewing her films today are more likely to have a reaction of Tastes Like Diabetes due to Values Dissonance. The racism of The Littlest Rebel (Shirley's character is shown in blackface at one point) is also startling to a modern audience.
Temple's star guttered out as she entered her late teens and early twenties, and she finally left Hollywood. After marrying her second husband, Temple entered politics, serving terms as chief of protocol and the U.S. ambassador to both Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
In 1988, she released her autobiography entitled Child Star, which was later adapted into a made-for-TV movie in 2001. In later years, Temple recalled the numerous incidents of child abuse she both witnessed and was subjected to, particularly on the set of Baby Burlesks, where misbehaving child performers were locked in an ice box and left to freeze. She also alleged in her memoirs (and in a Larry King Live interview) that MGM producer Arthur Freed (of Singin' in the Rain fame) exposed himself to her in his office when she was twelve; being unaware of the ensuing scandal, Shirley simply laughed it off but was later kicked out of Freed's office. Temple's mother Gertrude was also subject to lecherous advances from MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer himself! Despite Temple's allegations, neither Freed nor Mayer were formally investigated or charged of child sexual abuse. Temple cites this as the reason why she left MGM after working with just one film with them (Kathleen).
Temple died at the age of eighty-five in February 2014 as a result of COPD; she was a lifelong smoker, but hid the habit from the public eye so as not to set a bad example for younger fans who looked up to her. She was among the last of the stars from The Golden Age of Hollywood to pass on.
As an interesting aside, her older brother George Francis "Sonny" Temple Jr. was for a time a professional wrestler who went by his birth name in the ring, though his dreams of making it big in wrestling were ultimately hampered by his parents' disapproval and a motorcycle accident which left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Sonny's condition -- which later worsened into multiple sclerosis -- led his sister to leverage her fame into raising funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and advocate for those afflicted by it. Temple also advocated for breast cancer awareness when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1972. Her public disclosure and subsequent lobbying for better diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer patients was considered groundbreaking at the time when discussion of it was very much a taboo subject.
For her achievements in acting and as an ambassador, Google honored her with an animated doodle on June 9, 2021.
For some reason, characters based off her tend to be Spoiled Brats; she was chided a number of times by her mother for her behavior but was otherwise not known as such in real life.
Be careful not to confuse her with Darla Hood.
- Ten-Minute Retirement: She quit from show business at the age of 21 in 1949 after having spent most of her life in front of the camera, though she made sporadic appearances on television since the 50s until she retired for good in favor of pursuing a career in public service, having declined any further acting offers from that point forward; she did host the CBS special AFI 100 Years, 100 Stars in 1999 and remained as a member of SAG-AFRA until her death.
- Cheerful Child: Ms. Temple's usual role.
- Shirley's mother wanted her to be able to play sassy little brats, maybe even Enfants Terribles, and Shirley wanted to play more Action Girl type roles, but the studio (Twentieth Century Fox) wouldn't allow either.
- Crazy Prepared:
- In her memoirs, Shirley described how her parents and the Fox film studio managed her security. With the infamous Lindbergh kidnapping still fresh in everyone's minds and Shirley's status as a public figure, the Temples and Fox management along with their government and law enforcement contacts took no chances to ensure Shirley's safety: her bedroom door is wired to a photoelectric sensor--sophisticated for the time--and the windows are similarly wired with the LAPD on speed dial; a hypothetical kidnapping of the girl would have sent local police (and by extension the likes of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover as well as the media) into a frenzy. The closest Shirley got to getting shot during her acting days was in 1939 when a crazed woman pointed a handgun at her during a radio show, somehow believing that Shirley stole her deceased daughter's soul.
- Also in her memoirs was how Temple's mother eagerly anticipated her birth as a baby girl, and how she exposed herself to all sorts of works including classical music, literature and whatnot, as if to pre-emptively groom the then-unborn Shirley into a career she'd take almost as soon as she was born.
- The Danza: In four of her early films.[2]
- Deliberate Values Dissonance / Precision F-Strike: Her autobiography pulled no punches with her recollections to the point that the n-word was mentioned once (within the context of the era, of course; not that she would use it indiscriminately) and she recalled having been called a "little bitch" by Graham Greene (who controversially wrote a review of Wee Willie Winkie insinuating that she was an elementary school-age sex symbol); she is otherwise not that known for cussing due to her conservative upbringing.
- Doorstopper: Her autobiography, Child Star, took up over 600 pages. And that does not include the later half of her career as a public servant; as of 2026 the book is still being edited for posthumous publication by her estate.
- End of an Age: After the critical and commercial disaster that is The Blue Bird, Shirley appeared in one final feature for Fox titled Young People. Its plot – that of a girl orphaned as a baby who was adopted by a vaudevillian family and eventually settling down in the countryside – could be seen as a nostalgia-filled send-off for Temple whose child star days were inevitably coming to an end, complete with a Fake Shemp filling in for Shirley's toddler self and Stock Footage of two of her best-remembered films.
- Excuse Plot: A great many of Shirley's features are rather thin on the story and any plot elements are simply a framing device for her to showcase her talents which the American public saw as a respite from the trying times of the Great Depression. Two of them – Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – basically dispense of their source material and put Shirley's characters as a headline act on a radio show.
- Fake Shemp: Happened a few times with her films.
- Her long-time stand in Mary Lou Islieb filled in for her during the dream sequence in The Little Princess where Shirley performed ballet while Mary Lou – as Shirley's princess character in the film – was on the throne during distant shots where both the princess and ballerina are on-screen.
- In the film Young People, released a year after The Little Princess, Fox recreated scenes from both Stand Up and Cheer! and Curly Top which they reframed as moments where Shirley's character Wendy Ballantine was touring with her on-screen parents as part of a vaudeville troupe, where an uncredited Shirley lookalike portrayed a much younger Wendy during distant shots. This was combined with Stock Footage from the aforementioned films where Shirley's character is shown up close.
- Former Child Star: She was 19 when she starred in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, in her twenties when she co-starred in Fort Apache and starred in That Hagen Girl, and in her thirties when she hosted Shirley Temple's Storybook... but people only remember her childhood roles or her time in the diplomatic corps at the end of the 20th century. Unlike many of the examples in that page, Shirley's post-child star life was relatively stable in comparison.
- Heartwarming Orphan: Often (but not always) played these in her films.
- I Am Not Leonard Nimoy: Regardless of whichever role Shirley is in, she is still identified as that curly-haired cherub on-screen (the German dub of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was released as Shirley auf Welle 303/Shirley on Channel 303, even when Shirley is at least nominally portraying a character) and it stuck on her ever since.
- If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You: In Poor Little Rich Girl, Temple's character Barbara is forced to eat spinach, and says something along the lines of this. Barbara even performs a song on the radio based around this.
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: Some contemporary critics accused the producers of her films of exploiting her as this. As British film critic Graham Greene said in his review of Wee Willie Winkie, "Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire." Fox successfully sued Greene for libel, but at any rate, the creepy connotations occasionally associated with Shirley's films unfortunately tainted her legacy. Retrospective remarks critiqued if not outright condemned Greene for driving his point too far by framing his review in the point of view of a creep rather than simply condemning the perceived sexualisation of a child actress.
- Some of her earliest roles weren't quite as innocent — the characters she played in the pre-Hays Code Baby Burlesks shorts like 1933's Polly Tix in Washington often left innocence far behind. In her autobiography Temple herself described her character in Polly Tix as "a strumpet on the payroll of the Nipple Trust and Anti-Castor Oil Lobby. Mine was the task of seducing a newly arrived bumpkin senator".
- Pretty in Mink: She wore a white rabbit fur coat in one movie, and that's been the most common real fur choice for girls' coats since.
- The Red Stapler: Set a lot of trends for girls, notably the hairstyle.
- And the first name "Shirley", which was originally a boys' name (among others, the name is given to one of Anne of Green Gables' sons).
- Regal Ringlets
- She's All Grown Up: Her later films, like Since You Went Away, and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. They weren't as successful as most people associate her with her childhood years rather than as a teenager.
- Shoddy Knockoff Product: Besides licensed products featuring Temple's likeness, her popularity had also spurred tons of unauthorised goods with her face on it, such as "an army of unlicensed dolls, clothing and oddities" and even cigars with her likeness printed on the bands. While she was in retrospect appalled by the "elusive commercial scoundrels" unfairly cashing in on her childhood fame, she concluded that it made no financial sense to go after all the counterfeiters considering the costs of litigation and the economy of the time. They did however go after a few high-profile cases, one of them being Ideal filing a $100,000 patent infringement suit against a certain Lenora Doll Company who manufactured Shirley-esque dolls without permission. Temple herself was named as a co-plaintiff befitting her celebrity status during the height of her popularity.
- The Show Must Go On: A harrowing example came in 1939 when Shirley was doing a radio show appearance to promote her then-upcoming film The Blue Bird. A Loony Fan came right in the studio and pointed a loaded gun at Shirley while she was in the middle of a performance. Despite being at the mercy of an unhinged woman who was about to rub the girl out, Shirley continued on with her singing whilst waving at security who quickly manhandled the lady and disarmed her. The woman -- who appeared unkempt at the time -- was somehow convinced that Shirley had stolen her deceased daughter's soul and set herself out to avenge the baby's death.
- Wrench Wench: According to her autobiography, Shirley's mother Gertrude was quite the handywoman around the house, especially with her status as a homemaker.
- ↑ Shirley's full name is Shirley Jane Temple, with the middle name Jane added in honor of her paternal grandmother; although she occasionally uses her full name in correspondence and conversation, her birth certificate is simply listed as "Shirley Temple".
- ↑ Including Bright Eyes, the first movie written specifically with her in mind.