Actress.
Born: August 23, 1922.
Died: September 4, 2015.
Jean Darling, who has died aged 93, was one of the last stars of silent cinema, having first appeared in the Our Gang movies way back in 1927 when she was just four years old.
And she was a showbusiness veteran by then. She made her stage debut as a baby, in the arms of her actress mother, who would pinch her at appropriate moments to make her cry.
Her mother was determined to launch her on a showbusiness career at the earliest opportunity, even at the cost of her own marriage.
"I was five months old," she told one interviewer many years later. "I had been lying around for five months doing nothing. All I was doing was living off her … My father said 'Well, if you want to put her in movies, I won't be here when you get back.' Well, Mamma said "ha, ha" and off she went with me and when she came home he was gone."
Her mother's ambition was to get her into the Our Gang films, a series of phenomenally popular comedy shorts, and within a few years she had done so. With her distinctive blonde curls, Darling became one of the most familiar members of the "gang". It is reckoned that in three years she appeared in 46 of the silent films and six talkies.
She went on to play the young Jane Eyre in the 1934 adaptation of the novel. And, unlike many former child stars, she enjoyed some success as an adult too. She was in the original 1945 Broadway production of Carousel, toured as a singer and presented several television shows in the United States.
And she also led a relatively normal and happy life as an adult. She settled in Dublin in the 1970s, where she developed a further career as a writer, of children's stories, mysteries and radio plays.
She was born Dorothy Jean LeVake in 1922, in Santa Monica, California, probably on August 23, though the original records were seemingly destroyed by fire.
In one interview, she recalled that her mother camped on the doorstep of Hal Roach Studios, until she secured an audition for Our Gang. She said most of the children got along well, but it seems the parents were at each others' throats half the time.
The series continued into the 1940s, but many film scholars regard the silent films as best. They are notable now for the way in which they presented the playmates essentially as equals, irrespective of race, gender, size or shape.
In 1954 Darling married Reuben Bowen, who performed as Kajar the Magician, and they toured together in variety shows, though they eventually divorced. Two years ago Darling moved to Germany to live with her son Roy Hamilton-Bowen, a professional philatelist, who survives her. BRIAN PENDREIGH
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