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Cora Sue Collins, the charming child actress of the 1930s and ’40s who worked alongside such legends as Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne and Merle Oberon during her brief but sensational career, has died. She was 98.

Collins died Sunday at her home in Beverly Hills of complications from a stroke, her daughter, Susie Krieser, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Collins played younger versions of Colbert in Torch Singer (1933), Frances Dee in The Strange Case of Clara Deane (1932) and Keep ‘Em Rolling (1934), Loretta Young in Caravan (1934), Oberon in The Dark Angel (1935) and Lynn Bari in Blood and Sand (1941).

“I must have the most common face in the world,” she said in a 2019 interview. “I played either the most famous actresses of the ’30s as a child or their child. They made me up to look like everybody.”

The MGM contract player also was William Powell and Myrna Loy’s...

After teaming with Noah Baumbach to direct one of the best-ever documentaries about filmmaking, De Palma, Jake Paltrow is back with a new feature. June Zero is a vividly textured telling of the preparations for the 1962 execution of Adolf Eichmann through a triptych of perspectives––a Jewish Moroccan prison guard, an Israeli police investigator (and Holocaust survivor), and a clever and precocious 13-year-old Libyan immigrant. In advance of the June 28 release from Cohen Media Group, we’re pleased to exclusively reveal a series of influences the director has programmed for NYC’s Quad Cinema.

“Origin Stories: Jake Paltrow’s Notes on June Zero,” which runs June 21-27, features seven films that informed and influenced June Zero, with titles spanning humanist deep-cuts of world cinema from the likes of Miloš Forman and Abbas Kiarostami to underscreened classics of 1970s Israeli cinema. Watch the exclusive trailer for the series below, along with...

It’s hard to imagine Barbara Walters as anything other than a marquee-name, intrepid and pioneering journalist. But she didn’t get there overnight. A look back at the early career of the broadcast journalist, who died Dec. 30 at age 93, as documented in the pages of Variety shows the clear trajectory of a well-connected, industrious young woman who was destined to reach the summit of New York media and literati circles.

Variety’s coverage of Walters’ climb starting in the early 1950s also neatly tracks the rise of network TV news as a cultural force, and the subsequent evolution of TV news personalities into celebrities.

Walters’ status as the daughter of Broadway producer, booking agent and nightclub owner Lou Walters surely afforded her an early entrée into attention from Variety. Her first few references always included a reference to her father’s showbiz pedigree. But it wasn’t long before...

Friday marks 100 years since the former child star’s birth. And, while she was never allowed to properly grow up on screen, her performances show range – and some standout songs

A very silly and frankly odd musical, although perhaps not quite odd enough to qualify for cult status. Judy Garland plays a girl called Pinkie who is worried about her widowed mother, played by Mary Astor – and believes she needs to get remarried to a nice man. So with her pal Buzz, she in effect kidnaps her bemused but indulgent mother in a trailer and tours around the country looking for a likely stepdad candidate – and hits on Walter Pidgeon. As so often, Garland steals it with a standout song, this one being Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.

Actor and singer who started out as a Hollywood child star

Bobby Breen, who has died aged 87, belongs on the long list of Hollywood child stars whose careers were terminated or blunted by adolescence. It was particularly poignant for the curly-haired, cherubic Breen because his fame resided mainly in his high, prepubescent singing voice. Rainbow on the River (1936) was perhaps his best-known film, the title song also becoming his greatest hit on Decca records.

From the age of eight to 11, from 1936 to 1939, Breen, under contract to Rko Pictures, starred in eight hit movies, almost rivalling Shirley Temple and Freddie Bartholomew in popularity. The modest semi-musicals were cleverly constructed vehicles that highlighted his clear, boy soprano tones and natural acting ability. Although all the characters he played had one parent or were orphans, Breen was a cheerful, spunky child, who avoided the saccharine elements usual in such portrayals (like, for example,...

Anne Marie is tracking Judy Garland's career through musical numbers...

Though nobody guessed it when she was cast, Judy Garland’s fifth movie would be the first in a series starring the most famous child actor team in Hollywood history. Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, a Freddie Bartholomew vehicle sadly missing its intended star, saw the first team up of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Though both played supporting parts, their onscreen chemistry is clear. These kids were a hit!

The Movie: Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (MGM 1937)

The Songwriter: Arthur Freed (music and lyrics)

The Players: Ronald Sinclair, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, directed by Alfred E. Green

The Story: This bizarre little musical number perfectly encapsulates what would become the Mickey and Judy dynamic. Mickey is busy working at a project – in this case, trying to take Ronald Sinclair’s pants off (just in case you needed your daily dose of unintended homoerotic subtext). Meanwhile,...

Child actor Dickie Moore: 'Our Gang' member. Former child actor Dickie Moore dead at 89: Film career ranged from 'Our Gang' shorts to features opposite Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper 1930s child actor Dickie Moore, whose 100+ movie career ranged from Our Gang shorts to playing opposite the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, and Gary Cooper, died in Connecticut on Sept. 7, '15 – five days before his 90th birthday. So far, news reports haven't specified the cause of death. According to a 2013 Boston Phoenix article about Moore's wife, MGM musical star Jane Powell, he had been “suffering from arthritis and bouts of dementia.” Dickie Moore movies At the behest of a persistent family friend, combined with the fact that his father was out of a job, Dickie Moore (born on Sept. 12, 1925, in Los Angeles) made his film debut as an infant in Alan Crosland's 1927 costume drama The Beloved Rogue,...

Spencer Tracy Week! continues at Trailers from Hell with screenwriter Larry Karaszewski introducing Victor Fleming's 1937 tearjerker "Captains Courageous," starring Tracy as fisherman Manuel and young Freddie Bartholomew as the spoiled ward aboard a New England cod boat.Rudyard Kipling's 1897 novel gets the MGM treatment and becomes a parable of fatherly responsibility, full of director Victor Fleming's trademark Christian symbolism. Spencer Tracy gets his first solo shot at stardom as Portuguese fisherman Manuel, a minor character in the book. Jack Conway directed two weeks when Fleming fell ill. This is the kiddie matinee reissue trailer from the sixties.

Kino Classics will release the "David O. Selznick Collection" for the first time on Blu-ray and DVD on November 13. The collection focuses on the golden-age mogul's earlier productions and includes the Freddie Bartholomew classic "Little Lord Fauntleroy," the original 1937 version of "A Star is Born" starring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March, and William Wellman's "Nothing Sacred." Also part of the set are King Vidor's spicy South Seas adventure "Bird of Paradise," starring Dolores Del Rio and Joel McCrea, and Frank Borzage's 1932 version of "Farewell to Arms." "Nothing Sacred" and "A Star is Born" are both lavish Technicolor productions, preceding Selznick's most famous high-watt color production in 1939, "Gone with the Wind." The Kino collection's titles range from 1932 to 1937, which straddles the period between Selznick's work at both MGM and Rko, and his...

By Allen Gardner

A Separation (Sony) This drama from Iran won the 2011 Best Foreign Film Oscar, telling the story of a couple who file for a legal separation, with the wife pushing for a divorce. He won’t leave his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father behind, while she is wanting to take their young daughter with her to the United States. After a series of misunderstandings, threats and legal actions, the couple find that there is more than just their marriage that’s on the line. Hyper-realistic to a fault, reminiscent of the neo-realist films that came out of post-ww II Europe, but also repressive and redundant in the extreme, with the characters seeming to throw the same temper tantrum for two hours straight while the story, meanwhile, seems stalled. Wildly overpraised film is a real litmus test, with viewers seeming to be staunch defenders or equally impassioned detractors. It did win an Oscar,...

A reluctant Hollywood child star, he returned to the spotlight in the Superman movies

Jackie Cooper, who has died aged 88, was the first child star of the talkies, paving the way for Freddie Bartholomew, Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney. While they could turn on the waterworks when called for, Cooper beat them all easily at the crying game. Little Jackie, from the age of eight until his early teens, blubbed his way effectively through a number of tearjerkers. Sometimes he would try to suppress his tears, pouting and saying, "Ah, shucks! Ah, shucks!" As a critic wrote in 1934: "Jackie Cooper's tear ducts, having been more or less in abeyance for the past few months, have been opened up to provide an autumn freshet in Peck's Bad Boy."

Cooper had started off in the movies billed as "the little tough guy" in eight of Hal Roach's Our Gang comedy shorts.

Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, Lionel Barrymore as Billy Bones in Victor Fleming's Treasure Island Jackie Cooper Dies: Youngest Best Actor Oscar Nominee, Skippy, The Champ A series of programmers followed, among them Two Bright Boys (1939), once again pairing up Jackie Cooper with Freddie Bartholomew — who by then was sliding fast as well — and What a Life (1939), with Betty Field. In the latter release, Cooper played Henry Aldrich, a role he would incarnate once again in Life with Henry (1941) before Jimmy Lydon took over. Cooper's film career was interrupted during World War II. When he returned in the late 1940s, he found jobs scarce, appearing in only three minor features. Two of those, Kilroy Was Here (1947) and French Leave (1948), co-starred another former child star named Jackie, Charles Chaplin's little pal in The Kid, Jackie Coogan — who also happened to be Robert Coogan's older brother. [...]...