Shirley Temple cheered up Depression era-audiences

• Temple%27s career took off in 1934 with nine shorts and three feature films
• She received the first Juvenile Academy Award in 1935
• The former child star had a second act in politics and diplomacy

She wasn't Hollywood's first child star, but Shirley Temple, who died Monday night at age 85, became the one to which all others would forever be compared. A cinematic elixir during the depths of the Depression, from 1935 to 1938 Temple was the nation's top box-office draw.

It all began with her mother, like someone out of Central Casting. Gertrude Temple, a housewife in Santa Monica, Calif., already the mother of two sons ages 9 and 13, couldn't escape the thought that if she just had a daughter, she could make her a movie star. She persuaded her husband, banker George Temple, to roll the dice, and on April 23, 1928, Shirley Temple was born.

From her earliest days in the crib, the infant was taught to sing, sway to music and mimic voices. Gertrude curled the girl's hair in the style of a young Mary Pickford, and enrolled her at age 3 in Ethel Meglin's celebrated dance school (9-year-old Frances Gumm, the future Judy Garland, was a student there). Then she started making the rounds of casting directors.

Rejected for a spot in the popular Our Gang comedies, Shirley was cast in a series of shorts called BabyBurlesks, which were meant to compete with Our Gang, but never did.

Two years of bit parts (and one year shaved off her age) later, her mother secured a contract (as well as one for herself as Shirley's "coach") with 20th Century Fox, then trying to bolster its star roster to compete against MGM and Warner Bros.

Shirley filmed some small roles, then was loaned out to Paramount for her first starring role in Little Miss Marker. But before that movie came out, Fox's Stand Up & Cheer was released, in which the 5 (really 6)-year-old triple threat stole the show.

That year – 1934 – things really took off. Temple filmed nine shorts and three features (Including Bright Eyes, where she sang On the Good Ship Lollipop), appeared on 14 magazine covers and was the subject of dozens of articles. By the end of the year, merchandise in the form of Shirley Temple dolls, books, dishes, clothes, etc. was flying off the shelves. By then she had difficulty going out in public, for fear of being mobbed or kidnapped.

Shirley worked six days a week, and when not filming she had endless photo shoots and costume fittings, greeted famous visitors and fit in her schoolwork. Her mother supervised everything, helped her memorize her lines and sat next to the director on set, calling out, "Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!" when filming would begin. The studio built Shirley a bungalow with furniture scaled to her size to accommodate her long days.

Gertrude kept tight control over everything, keeping Shirley away from fellow child actors (and most other children, too) and oblivious to much of the world beyond what was right in front of her.

Just a year later, Hollywood expressed its gratitude to her by awarding her the first Juvenile Academy Award in 1935.

Shirley's distinctive curls, pout and precocious manner and the feel-good, tried-and-true plot lines brought moviegoers to the theaters in droves. Her movies followed a formula: Shirley almost always played an orphan whose adorability melts the heart of a crotchety old man. In her films, goodness (in the form of Shirley's character) always triumphs over evil, and in the end all is right with the world.

As biographer Anne Edwards summed it up, "Her success [was] the combination of her own charm, Gertrude's ambition, the world's condition, good exposure and film stories that had accidentally placed the child in a position of being 'Little Miss Fix-It' in the lives of adults."

In 1935's The Little Colonel Lionel Barrymore plays the gruff older man, but the film is best known for the "stair dance" she performed with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. He would co-star in three more of her films: The Littlest Rebel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Just Around the Corner.

Shirley was among the very highest paid actors in 1937, at $307,000; she made 15 times that in endorsements and licensing that year.

And she made her cultural mark in other ways. In the late '30s it's said that a bartender at Chasen's in Beverly Hills mixed ginger ale and grenadine, garnished with a maraschino cherry, and served it to the young actress. Forever after known as the "Shirley Temple," the sweet, pretty-as-pink concoction became the gateway cocktail for generations of kids.

But the life of a child star could also be fraught. For the studio's diminutive gold mine, the loss of a baby tooth was a potential disaster. According to Edwards, a dentist made porcelain copies of Shirley's teeth, and if one fell out during filming, it was replaced with a replica in a plate that Shirley wore in her mouth.

In 1938, her movies started to do less well, and in 1940, despite having made them $30 million in profits from 22 films, Fox cut her contract.

With less-than-attractive offers from other studios, Shirley enrolled in the 7th grade at L.A.'s exclusive Westlake School for Girls. She enjoyed the novelty of mixing with kids her own age, and she was happy to leave her film career behind.

But Gertrude wasn't ready to give up her dream just yet, so Shirley continued to make the odd movie, none of which became hits. As a young teen, she was being eclipsed by Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood and Judy Garland, whom audiences found easy to follow into adulthood.

In what seems clearly a bid for independence, at 17 Shirley married John Agar, a serviceman she barely knew. Four years and one daughter later, they divorced.

Shirley continued to occasionally make movies, but she by then she had banished Gertrude from the set, and her preparation suffered as a result. Gertrude was brought back in for That Hagen Girl in 1947, but the film still flopped.

Her final film was The Story of Seabiscuit in 1949. The former child star would have a second act, though, in politics and diplomacy.

Shirley married Charles Black in 1950 and moved to the Washington, D.C., suburbs, where he was stationed in the Office of Naval Operations and where she became interested in Republican politics. They moved back to Los Angeles in 1953, then to Northern California for good, and had two children.

Shirley became involved in fundraising for a cure for multiple sclerosis, which her brother had.

In 1967 she ran for Congress on a platform to increase U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, cut government waste and environmental conservation, but lost in the Republican primary to anti-war candidate Paul "Pete" McCloskey, who went on to win the general election.

After campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1968, Temple was rewarded with an appointment to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.

Back home in 1972, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. She spoke openly about it, then wrote about the experience in McCall's.

In 1974 President Gerald R. Ford appointed her Ambassador to Ghana. "Her ambassadorial style was a unique blend of show-business know-how and serious dedication to her job," wrote Edwards in Shirley Temple: American Princess.

Toward the end of the Ford administration she was appointed the chief of protocol, and under President George H.W. Bush she served as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia.

Temple received numerous awards and honors in her lifetime, including the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 and the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

Charles Black died in 2005. Shirley Temple Black is survived by her children, Linda Susan Agar, Charles Alden Black, Jr., and Lori Alden Black.