The first thing I remember about Veronica Cartwright is getting oomphy with friends who confused her with her sister, Angela Cartwright, of The Sound of Music, Make Room for Daddy, and Lost in Space. Not at all the same kid! Veronica is the elder, edgier sister, the Twilight Zone girl, the kid with the lovebirds in The Birds, the tormented klepto in The Children's Hour.  She could play troubled, anxious, and lonely.

Which brings me to the second thing I remember about Veronica Cartwright: being really happy to see her appropriately freaking out in Alien and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the late 70s, and popping up in the oddest places ever since, from Witches of Eastwick to Will & Grace.

She made her first film appearance in a Robert Wagner vehicle called In Love and War at the age of nine, made a bunch of commercials, and was recurring bossy pants character, Violet Rutherford, on Leave It to Beaver. Between 1958 and 1963 Cartwright made a number of films in addition to appearing on popular TV shows. By the mid-1960s, she was mostly on television, working regularly until the end of the decade. There were a few lean years in the early 70s, but by and large, Veronica Cartwright made a graceful, successful (and I hope lucrative) transition from child star to adult actor.

The woman is only 65 (or will be this week) so I expect we'll have many more years to be surprised and delighted by her work.

In the meantime, if you haven't seen it in a while, here she is in one of those Twilight Zones that hits you right between the eyes.

Charmed as I've always been by the late Deanna Durbin, I came late to the singing child star party. I have, therefore, been woefully remiss in appreciating Gloria Jean, Maybe it's because so few of her kind of films are shown on television anymore, nor are they readily available on DVD. Or maybe it's just that my memory of her is clouded by whatever else was distracting me in the films of hers I have seen: too busy hating Jerry Lewis, for instance, in The Ladies Man (1961); missing the rest of the Marx Brothers in Copacabana (1947); or just blocking out any operatic number that tended to turn up in Hollywood musicals for a time (whither Kathryn Grayson?).

But Gloria Jean was a sweet performer with a lovely voice, pretty good comic delivery, and some fancy dancing with the likes of Donald O'Connor. She was the ideal adorable young charge to whatever larger star dominated a picture. In other words, you could see why someone like W.C. Fields would give a damn.

She was born Gloria Jean Schoonover in Buffalo, New York, but her parents, a music store owner and a former circus bareback rider (guess which was which), moved the family to Scranton, which she thereafter considered her hometown. Young Gloria's singing talent was evident early on, and she became a local singing sensation by the age of five. When she was twelve, Gloria auditioned for Joe Pasternak, "the King of Musicals," who was looking for another little opera singer to replace (or to put contract pressure on) Deanna Durbin, who had the effrontery to grow up and get itchy to try something new.

Gloria became an instant, if short-lived sensation with her first picture, The Under-Pup, the story of a poor city girl (Gloria Jean) who goes to summer camp with a bunch of rich girl bullies, teaches them a thing or two, then wins them over. She made a succession of similar, charming vehicles, but by the early 1940s, was being pushed into jalopy and jitterbugging teenage B-pictures, and her career never quite recovered.

She made a few television appearances in the 1950s on popular shows, but quite the business altogether when she got married in 1962. The marriage lasted only a short while, but Gloria and her son built a happy life together and she enjoyed a new career with a cosmetics company until her retirement in 1993. New interest in her life and career emerged when a number of her public domain films were being bought and sold on eBay. Gloria's sister and good pal, Bonnie, made Gloria Jean memorabilia a hot commodity with a little online store of their own.

Why the hell not, I say?

I hope the renewed interest prompts more DVD releases of her work. Gloria Jean is certainly worth the effort.

One of the first Birthdays of the Week that ever occurred to me to post was in honor of Virginia Weidler, perhaps the most natural, funniest, most well-adjusted child actor of all. She made more than 40 pictures before the age of 16, made a brief attempt to transition to more adult roles, but decided ultimately to move on with her life.

Ginny left Hollywood in 1947, married naval officer Lionel Krisel, with whom she had two sons, Gary (a Disney executive) and Ronnie (a commercial photographer), and never looked back. She led a private, happy family life until her untimely death of a heart attack at age 41. 

I shall point you to the excellent Virginia Weidler Remembrance Society for details of her life and career and for suggestions on how to celebrate what would have been Ms. Weidler's 86th birthday.

Let's all hope ginnyfan hurries up and writes her biography already, so we can find out when she fit in a childhood bout of rheumatic fever around all those movies (see heart attack, above).

I don't know about you, but I think I'll watch The Under Pup on Friday.

Harold Ribotsky was the youngest of seven children born to Polish -Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a property developer who lost his fortune in the 1929 market crash. Chester began his long and industrious career as a delivery boy, Wall Street runner, newsboy, magician's assistant, and painter before trying his hand at acting. He appeared in the Broadway premier of Dead End using the stage name "Hally Chester" as one of the "Dead End Kids," and later turned up in the 1937 film by the same name. 

For the remainder of the 1930s, Chester played various street urchins, thugs, and petty criminals in B serials as a "Little Tough Guy" or an "East Side Kid." Shortly after WWII, Chester purchased the rights to Joe Palooka, a popular comic strip, and made the switch from film actor to producer, changing his name to the more adult sounding "Hal E. Chester." He cranked out 11 Joe Palooka pictures between 1946 and 1951 and went on to produce a number of B crime dramas, including The Underworld Story (1950) with my pal, Dan Duryea, and Crashout (1955) with William Bendix and my girlfriend, Beverly Michaels.

Chester also produced the science fiction classic, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which featured an atomic-test-generated giant lizard thingy (precursor to the highly trademarked Japanese version whose name I can't afford to mention) and Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animation.

In 1955, Chester moved to England to work on internationally co-produced films, which included the very spooky Jacques Tourneur film Night of the Demon in 1957 and a number of well-regarded comedies.

Hal E. Chester retired in 1970 and remained in London until his death on March 25, 2012 at the age of 91. His was an interesting, varied, and oddly prolific career.

Freddie Bartholomew: Complete Biography of the 1930′s MGM Child Star

By Cliff Aliperti, 8/18/2012, immortalephemera.com

I mean no disrespect to Hufflepuff or Freddie Bartholomew, I just think the kid had more hard work, sweetness, and gardening in him than swashbuckling and rule-breaking.

Freddie Bartholomew was a natural actor, most often cast in period dramas that called for poised, articulate, polite, real boys. Rich boys, but real boys. He generally played the upper-class child who had fallen on hard times or bad circumstances who is tested and ultimately wins -- if not his rightful place, then a valuable life lesson. I loved his shock of thick curly hair, the way he looked bullies right in the eye while saying sissy things all Received-Pronunciation-y, like, "I'd like to get by, please." Like a slightly older, slightly butcher Roddy McDowall, he was always so enjoyable and interesting to watch.

This sweet boy's upbringing was troubled and, frankly, a little mysterious. His two older sisters stayed with his parents while Freddie was raised by his father's sister, Millicent, from the time he was a baby. As far as I can tell, his birth parents had very little to do with him until after the success of David Copperfield  (1935), when they showed up in Hollywood to claim custody of him -- and his earnings. Much of those earnings were eaten up by the long, drawn out legal battle that ensued, then by the settlement, in which Freddie remained with his aunt, but his money went to his parents and siblings for their upkeep.

By the time the dust settled, Freddie had grown out of the youngster roles and tried to make the transition to more adult parts without much success. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1943 and served the war as a mechanic until a back injury forced him out of the service. He never regained a film career, but turned instead to advertising, eventually become a television producer and director through the agency Benton & Bowles.

Freddie Bartholomew died of emphysema and heart failure in Florida on January 23, 1992 at the age of 67.

Thankfully, his pictures are readily available in several formats. Little Lord Fauntleroy's copyright expired and is now in the public domain, so you can watch it right now if you like:

I'm going to make my kid start calling me "Dearest," but only when he wants something. Like an American.

My copy of Bonita Granville and the Mystery of Star Island
By Kathryn Heisenfelt
Whitman Publishing, 1942

What my sister wrote on the front endpaper of a gift copy:

And by all accounts a very nice person in real life.

I'm always glad to see Bonita Granville when she shows up in a picture. Some of her earlier work was uncredited (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Westward Passage) and her later work was eminently supporting (The Mortal Storm, Now Voyager) so there's ample opportunity to be pleasantly surprised. Thanks to her breakout role as Mary Tilford, the manipulative sociopath of a girl who ruins the lives of two teachers in These Three  (the movie version of Lillian Hellman's play, "The Children's Hour"), Granville became the go-to brat/crumbum child in the late 1930s. 

She was the daughter of actor Bernard "Bunny" Granville, who before pictures worked in a traveling minstrel show, the circus, and vaudeville, ultimately headlining in the Ziegfield Follies. The family moved from New York to Hollywood where "Bunny" appeared in a handful of pictures, and Bonita began her long career in 1932 at the ripe old age of eight. Her father died a few years later, but I can't seem to find out how or why; he was only 50. (Note to aspiring biographers: I would very much like to read The Bunny Granville Story; transient youth, three wives, WWI aviator, died young...writes itself.)

Bonita Granville made 50 movies by the time she was 23 years old and left the business when she married oil millionaire Jack Wrather, also a producer. Granville became a successful businesswoman in her own right, producing the very popular Lassie TV series and running Wrather Corp. after the death of her husband. She was the fifth chair of the American Film Institute, although she didn't care to see many modern movies, because of the "indecency" and general explicitness therein: "It destroyed romance and imagination that goes along with sex. And that's pretty important because, otherwise, sex becomes mechanical. Don't get me wrong. I'm a great believer in sex. But that's not the way to go about it." 

One cannot argue. 

I admit, I enjoy her better when she's playing a meanie or a schemer, but I do have a special fondness for her Nancy Drew: all bright-eyed and plucky and smart.

Bonita Granville Wrather died in Santa Monica in 1988 of cancer at the age of 65. She was a peach.

Haven't seen this one, but it looks good, don't you think? 

Interviewed in Growing Up on the Set,
By Tom Goldrup and Jim Goldrup, McFarland & Company, 2002

Who knows? If it weren't for Shirley Temple, Bonita Granville, or Jane Withers, Marcia Mae Jones might have been better known today or would at least have had meatier roles. She did seem to get the choice second part to a bigger box office child actor, however, and always turned in an admirable, and often excellent, performance.

I first came to know her as the mean Lavinia in The Little Princess (1939), and since (sorry) I'm not the biggest Shirley Temple fan, I was kind of rooting for the brat. By that time, 15-year-old Jones had already been in about 25 pictures, pushed into show business by one of those mothers, who pushed her siblings into movies as well, Like Baby Peggy, Marcia Mae Jones was the family breadwinner at an early age and also had to contend with the professional jealousies of her brothers and sister when her career outpaced theirs.

Perhaps her best and most famous performance was as the tormented Rosalie Wells in the 1936 adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play, "The Children's Hour." Retitled These Three, the film starred Merle Oberon, Joel MacCrea, and Miriam Hopkins, with Bonita Granville as the evil child, Mary. The film was remade in 1961 under the play's original title, with Veronica Cartwright (also excellent and not as famous as she should be) in the part played by Jones.

By the 1940s, Marcia Mae Jones had gone from playing decent secondary roles to kind of crummy teenage starring roles with titles like Lady in the Death House * (1944) and Street Corner **(1948). She made a number of appearances on television comedies and dramas throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. She also had a part in the 1973 film The Way We Were, but I honestly can't remember her in it.

As an adult, Jones was plagued by personal and emotional problems, which she attributed in part to her stage mother. Her second husband, television writer Bill Davenport (Hogan's Heroes, I Dream of Jeannie, All in the Family, Maude), struggled with drugs and alcohol and eventually committed suicide. Jones herself fought alcohol addiction, overcoming her dependency later in life. 

She remained lifelong friends with Jane Withers since they appeared together in the film Gentle Julia (1936).

Marcia Mae Jones died September 2, 2007 of pneumonia at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement community at the age of 83.

If you ever get the chance to see the documentary, Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room, you ought. Dutch director, Vera Iwerebor, began corresponding with Diana Serra Cary (aka"Baby" Peggy Montgomery) in the early 1990s and the film is a collaboration borne of their twenty-year friendship. Because of that friendship, Diana Cary is more candid than she's ever been in discussing her experience as a huge box office star, the tremendous responsibility of being the family breadwinner at 20 months old, and the dreadful mismanagement of her earnings by her father and grandfather. 

It's positively Greek — if Aeschylus had written Gypsy, that is: A rapacious, scheming father; an emotionally unavailable mother; a thieving cad of a step-grandfather; and an overshadowed sibling who couldn't help but resent the toddler sister who paid the bills.

So many, many bills.  So many, many horrible decisions made by "adults" in her life.

Understandably eager to rid herself of the "Baby Peggy" persona in early adulthood, Cary changed her name, converted to Catholicism, and became a writer and noted film historian. How this woman grew into the gracious, intelligent, lovely person she is turns out to be — and not, say, a raving mental patient — is a miracle of human resilience.

Seriously. See The Elephant in the Room.