The most popular of Hollywood's child stars, Shirley Temple earned that distinction with uncommon talent as an actress, singer, and dancer. A star at six years of age, Shirley Temple had an unprecedented and (for a child star) still unequaled string of hit movies throughout the better were quickly produced sentimental tales. But the public couldn't get enough of her.
An entire industry was soon spawned by her popularity, including Shirley Temple dolls and coloring books. When Shirley Temple introduced her trademark song, "On the Good Ship, Lollipop," in Captain January (1936), it seemed as if every child in America (as well as their parents) had the song on their lips.
As her popularity grew, so did the budgets and the quality of her films. In 1937 she starred in a much underrated JOHN FORD film, Wee Willie Winkie, and in that same year starred in the classic version of Heidi. In 1938, she remade MARY PICKFORD's silent hit Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and made it a hit all over again. It was also the year that she reached the height of her stardom, becoming Hollywood's number-one box office attraction. Her descent from the pinnacle came swiftly thereafter.
By the end of the 1930s, Shirley Temple suffered several flops and the magic was gone. No longer a precious little girl, the pretty teenager had lost her audience. In 1942, she tried to establish herself as an adolescent star in Miss Annie Rooney (1942), in which she received her first screen kiss from another aging child star, Dickie Moore.
Later, Shirley Temple was perfectly adequate as an ingenue in some very fine 1940s movies such as Since You Went Away (1944), The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), and Fort Apache (1948), but neither her roles nor her performances were so special that they catapulted her back into the limelight.
Without singing and dancing, Shirley Temple was just an ordinary actress. Perhaps the biggest mistake of her postpubescent years was that she didn't follow the lead set by such young stars as Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin who hit it big in musicals.
Shirley Temple's film career was over by the end of the 1940s; her last film was A Kiss for Corliss (1949). She made attempts to resurrect her career on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but her time had come and gone. Known as Shirley Temple Black after her marriage to businessman Charles Black in 1950 (it was her second marriage; the first was to actor John Agar), she later became active in conservative politics and served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations during the late 1960s, and as the American ambassador to Ghana from 1974 through 1976.
Shirley Temple then became the U.S. chief of protocol. After a successful battle with breast cancer, she retreated from the public scene until the publication of her autobiography, Child Star, in 1988. She was appointed ambassador to Czechoslovakia by President George H. W. Bush. Shirley Temple was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center in 1998.
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