Episode 292 Women's History Month - The Life of Shirley Temple Black
About this episode
This episode explores the life and career of Shirley Temple Black, highlighting her rise to fame as a child star in the 1930s and her later life.
What a show! WWe dive deep into the life of Shirley Temple Black, from her young life as a precocious little girl with a smile, to her mother's enrolling her in the Meglin Kiddies Dance School at the age of three, to her subsequent discovery a few months later, hiding behind the piano when Educational Pictures director Charles Lamont came to the school looking for talent. She at first joined the Baby Burlesks, a somewhat uncomfortable series in which toddlers, clad in costumes above the waist and diapers below recreated onscreen moments from more famous pictures...this led to many unclomfortable moments among viewers. But her performance in Stand Up and Cheer! impressed the directors at Fox who signed her to a simple contract and proceeded to make movies like The Littlest Rebel, Curly Top, Dimples, amd The Littlest Princess where she played an adorable moppet with an unforgettable smile who became the single most bankable star of the 1930's. Not one performer in that era made as much as this singing and tap-dancing little starlet. When she aged out of that kind of role both Fox and MGM tried to repackage heer and she made a handful of films that ranged from watchable to deeply…
Topics covered
- Shirley Temple Black
- Hollywood history
- child actors
Keywords
- child star
- Hollywood
- 1930s
- biography
Mentioned in this episode
Products: Stand Up and Cheer!, The Littlest Rebel, Curly Top, Dimples, The Littlest Princess
Books & works: the Baby Burlesks, Stand Up and Cheer!, The Littlest Rebel, Curly Top, Dimples, The Littlest Princess
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- Episode 293 The Great Stork Derby - Charles Vance Millar's Most Outrageous Practical Joke
- Episode 291 Women's History Month - Walking the Walk - Emma Gatewood's Appalachian Treks
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