Daytime viewers will be treated to season of Shirley Temple films

Press, 8 May 1986, Page 11

Daytime viewers will be treated to season of Shirley Temple films

Shirley Temple first captivated filmgoers’ hearts during the depression years of the 19305. Although she is now 58, with significant political achievements to her credit, her old films are still entertaining many on the small screen and will brighten Two’s matinee and afternoon movie slots in the coming months.

The first crop of Shirley Temple movies will screen during the May school holidays with “The Little Princess” scheduled for this Sunday, at 12 noon; “Stowaway” for Monday, May 12, at 4 p.m. and “Curly Top” on May 19 at 4.10 p.m.

The season continues with “Wee Willie Winkie” on May 26 and “Bright Eyes” on June 8. Other titles, among them “Stand Up And Cheer” and "Susannah Of The Mounties,” are planned for screening in July and August. Born on April 23, 1928, in Santa Monica, California, Shirley Temple began taking dancing classes at the age of three and was chosen from among her classmates to appear in a series of films before she reached four.

The series, called “Baby Burlesks” were one-reel take-offs of famous and current stars with tiny children wearing nappies playing all the parts. At the same time, she began playing bit parts in feature films and attracted attention in 1934 in a song-and-dance number, “Baby Take A Bow,” which she performed in the film “Stand Up And Cheer.”

She was consequently signed by Fox and within months reached unprecedented heights of popularity. At the end of her first year as a child star, she received a special Academy Award “in grateful recognition of her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment during the year 1934.” By 1938 she had topped all other Hollywood stars as the number one boxoffice attraction.

At the height of her success she was virtually a national institution, a model for the child every mother wanted and every little girl tried to imitate. A whole industry developed around the Shirley Temple phenomenon—dolls, colouring books and dresses.

Stagestruck mothers poured into Hollywood, helpless infants in tow, made up to look like Shirley Temple. The jealous mothers of unsuccessful children spread the stories that she was not really a little girl, but a little boy or a precocious midget. The songs she sang are among the most vivid of the music memories of the thirties. Her tap dances in many of her films with the masterful negro dancer, Bill Robin-

son, had a charming innocence hard to equal.

Her roles were strikingly similar to each other, except for a change in locale and supporting players. She was usually an orphan finding and adopting her own parents, or, with one parent, finding him or her the right soul-mate.

No child star before or after her enjoyed so great a popularity, but by 1940 she was quickly approaching the status of a hasbeen.

She terminated her Fox contract following two flops, but fared no better at M.G.M., which let her go after only one production. She continued appearing in films of various studios through the late forties, but she did not hold the same appeal as an adolescent and an ingenue that she had held as a child.

She attempted a comeback on television in 1958 as the hostess of “The

Shirley Temple Storybook,” but the show was not renewed after its first year. She tried again with “The Shirley Temple Show” in 1960, but the results were similarly discouraging.

In the late 1960 s she entered politics and ran unsuccessfully for the vacant Republican congressional seat of her home district of San Mateo, California.

In 1968 she was appointed by President Nixon as a United States representative at the United Nations. She served as the United States’ ambassador to Ghana from 1974 till 1976, when she became the United States’ chief of protocol.

Divorced from the actor, John Agar, whom she married when she was 17, she has been married since 1950 to the business executive, Charles Black, and is now officially known as Shirley Temple Black.