90 years ago today, Sheura Temple was born in Santa Monica, California, USA. In her 85 years of life, she has left so many good memories.
Temple began learning to dance at the age of 3, and at the age of 6 was taken in by songwriter Jay Goni, who invited her to participate in "Standing up and cheering". Since then, this little girl with a small golden curly hair and two smiling little dimples, with her chubby calves, stepping on the beat of a serious dance of those complicated tap dances, jumped all the way to her walk of fame, in "Bright Eyes", "New Qunfang Conference", "Little Angel", "Little Rebel", "Little Colonel", "Little Curly Hair", "Miss Broadway" and other movies, she melted the hearts of countless audiences with her childish singing, clear eyes, innocent character, etc. At the age of 7, he became the most box-office star in Hollywood.
In the 1930s and 1940s, during the Great Depression in the United States, when the crisis led to shortages of money and the difficulty of finding jobs, Temple lit up American life with her singing, dancing, and sweet smile, inspiring people in distress, and Franklin Roosevelt said, "As long as we still have Shalan Temple, our country has no problem."
In the films tailored for her, Temple always appears as an orphan whose parents have died, and she wins the love of the people around her with her carefree innocence and optimism, dances with black people, lives with the poor people at the bottom, and finally all people will be touched by this bright eyes and small curly hair, and those "bad people" will eventually be changed by her, and finally the family will be happy.
In 1935, she won the seventh Academy Awards for starring in Bright Eyes, and received a small golden figure tailored for her. She later recalled: "I don't know whose cute idea was to tailor a shrunken Oscar for my height." If my job is truly outstanding, why not give me an Oscar the same size as anyone else? ”
7 to 10 years old was the heyday of Temple's screen, she dedicated all her joy and smile to the screen audience, became the pillar of the box office, paid more than $120,000, the ticket price at that time was only 15 cents a piece, although the American people were financially strapped, they were still willing to go to the cinema to spend money, thus saving the twentieth century Fox on the verge of collapse. At that time, "Temple" peripheral products from handkerchiefs, clothing, soap, underwear to toys and dolls were robbed by people. On her 8th birthday, she received 135,000 gifts from all over the world, as well as two wallabies from fans.
In order to maintain the image of this "Little Sweetheart of America", Twentieth Century Fox deliberately designed everything, did not allow her to make friends casually, created an isolated paradise for her, raised rabbits, set up swings, had full-time tutors, bodyguards, full-time secretaries for her to reply to more than 4,000 fan letters a week, the best makeup artists, the best directors, the best screenwriters and the best videographers served her, all the people in the studio held her, in short, filtered all the cruelty in the real world for her.
Like all child stars, Temple also faced the problem of growing up and transforming, and after 1939, she gradually became a beautiful girl, but her acting career went downhill. Because 20th Century Fox refused MGM's invitation, she missed the 1939 release of "The Wizard of Oz" and missed the best opportunity for transformation, and in the subsequent "Little Orphan Girl", fans could no longer see the childish, cute little person of the past: "This is not Xiulan Temple!" ”
Temple then went to school, at the age of 17, met her first love, married the actor John Agar, gave birth to a daughter at the age of 20, but the marriage lasted only 4 years, in 1950, at the age of 22, she divorced with her two-year-old daughter, and also completely withdrew from the film industry.
Nine days later, she married businessman Charles Blake and bore him a son and a daughter. Her friend Hoover, then the FBI director, is said to have investigated Blake's background for her, saying that "he was as pure as applesauce," had never seen her movies before, and knew nothing about her past. The marriage lasted for 55 years until Blake's death in 2006.
It was her ability to communicate between two opposing social classes in the film that made her friends with the ruthless, cruel, and unprofitable Hoover, and in 1936, President Roosevelt met with Temple, and at the age of 8 she mischievously threw a small stone behind the president's wife, and Hoover suspected that she had been instructed to talk to her. In the face of the terrible old man, she danced with her little finger in the palm of his hand like those characters in her movie, and even made the terrifying horror character melt in an instant. She quit the screen and once lost her jewelry, hoover helped her get it back in three days, saying to her, "The purpose of the police is to catch thieves, and my purpose is only to make you laugh, so I can get ahead of them." ”
Temple also starred with Ronald Reagan in 1947 in a film produced by Warner Bros. "That Hagen Girl," in which reagan was said to have had her first on-screen kiss as an adult. The film was dismal at the box office, but it was of great help to Temple's political career in the future.
In 1967, Temple ran for Congress as a Republican, but lost. She then reached Washington through the Path of Foreign Affairs: she worked on foreign affairs for eight years at the State Department under Reagan; as Republican speaker, Nixon's representative to the United Nations; for Ford's U.S. ambassador to Ghana; and later as the first woman to serve as director of the President's Protocol Department. He visited China in April 1977. In 1989, she was appointed ambassador to Czechoslovakia by Bush Sr. bush, the pinnacle of her political career.
In 1988, Temple published her autobiography, and by then she was a high-profile diplomatic figure in American politics. For the first time, she told the world about her hidden shadows under the dazzling child starlight: "The number one problem in Hollywood is pedophilia, and it has always been like this. I was surrounded by them when I was 14 years old. I didn't know what they were until I grew up, and I didn't realize what they were and what they wanted, and the people around me were like vultures. ”
At the age of 4, if she did not cooperate during filming, she would be locked up in a dark room with only an ice chair; during rehearsals, she and her child stars of the same year had to recite adult lines, imitating adult flirtations and fights; on the set, she would sometimes be bullied and beaten by various people behind their parents' backs, because the light was too strong, and they were jealous and rejected by adult actors and actresses. At the age of 10, she was threatened with assassination; when she reached the bottom of her acting career at the age of 12, she and her mother were sexually harassed by Fox executives.
As early as 1937, the British writer Graham Green wrote in a film review that Temple's "admirers—middle-aged men and priests—responded to her questionable femininity and hugely energetic little body, simply because the curtain of story and dialogue fell safely between their intelligence and desire." Fox sued him and fled to Mexico to avoid interrogation.
In 2014, Ms. Amy Berg's documentary "An Open Secret" told about Hollywood pedophilia, and the brightest child star in the United States, Xiulan Temple, was one of the victims of "child predators", because of the disclosure of this matter, the director was later persecuted by Hollywood.
On February 10, 2014, Temple, 85, died at her home in California. Even though more than half a century has passed, people still remember this little angel sent from Heaven, her little curly hair and little dimples, and the laughter she brought.