Fellows, centre, who often had spoilt brat roles, plays a sweet kid sister with Rita Hayworth and Tony Martin in Music in My Heart, 1940.
Child stars, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney, who have long and successful careers as adults are the exception. Edith Fellows, who has died aged 88, had a film career longer than most – it lasted 13 years from the age of six – though it wasn't without its ups and downs. It is a familiar story: a talented child, exploited by avaricious adults, often family members, suffers in later life.
Fellows, born in Boston, had a domineering paternal grandmother, who was left to take care of the two-month-old baby, whose mother had walked out on the family and disappeared. The grandmother later barred Edith's mostly absent father, a mechanic, from seeing his daughter when she got into the movies. "She did not want anyone around me," Fellows explained. "No one. Just the two of us."
In 1935, when Fellows was at the height of her fame, her mother suddenly turned up, accused the grandmother of kidnapping her child, and sued for custody of her daughter and control of her earnings. "She wanted my money, past, present and future," explained Fellows. In the end, Fellows chose to stay with her grandmother, rather than her equally "cold and tough" mother, testifying that she was "not used to loving strangers".
Her considerable earnings were placed in a trust, but when she turned 21, with her film career over, Fellows found that only $900 out of around $150,000 remained. She never discovered where the money had gone, but always blamed the missing thousands on her mother.
It all started when her grandmother enrolled the four-year-old Fellows at a dancing school in South Carolina, where the child proved to be a gifted dancer, singer and mimic. Hoping to fulfil her own acting ambitions by proxy, the grandmother decided they should move to Hollywood, following the trail of thousands of youngsters seeking stardom. One day, when Fellows accompanied a neighbour's son to an audition at Hal Roach studios, she began dancing and singing in front of the director without being asked. It was enough to get her a contract.
Fellows's first film was a hilarious Charley Chase silent short called Movie Night (1929), in which she played Charley's brat of a daughter on a family visit to the movies. Fellows then appeared in a couple of Our Gang comedies, Shivering Shakespeare (1930) and Mush and Milk (1933), although these were not enough to consecrate her as a member of the celebrated troupe. After small roles, usually as orphans, Fellows had the dubious distinction of playing Adele Rochester in Jane Eyre (1934), Monogram studios' flagrantly unfaithful version of Charlotte Brontë's novel. To her credit, Fellows managed a reasonable semblance of an English accent (Adele is not French in this adaptation) and makes the most of the extended role playing a little matchmaker between her guardian Edward Rochester (Colin Clive) and Jane Eyre (inappropriately portrayed by glamorous blonde Virginia Bruce).
In the same year, she appeared in Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Although WC Fields as a mail-order bridegroom provided most of the comedy, Fellows stemmed some of the sentimentality as Australia Wiggs, one of five children being brought up in a shanty town by their poverty-stricken mother, whose husband had deserted her. But it was her performance in Gregory La Cava's She Married Her Boss (1935) as Melvyn Douglas's deceitful little monster of a daughter, tamed when Claudette Colbert "spanks the daylight out of her" with a hairbrush, that deservedly earned Fellows a seven-year contract with Columbia studios.
She was cast again as a spoilt brat in And So They Were Married (1936), this time trying to keep her divorced mother (Mary Astor) from remarrying. In Pennies from Heaven (also 1936), Fellows is fine as a tough, precocious waif protected by Bing Crosby's singing vagabond. Her tantrums are abated this time, not with a spanking, but with the soothing crooning of Crosby, particularly the title song sung to her during a thunderstorm.
Columbia then continued to typecast her in the title roles of B-pictures such as Tugboat Princess (1936), Little Miss Roughneck (1938) and The Little Adventuress (1938), the last publicising her as "your favourite cyclone in curls". In contrast, Fellows had the rare chance to sing and play it sweet as Rita Hayworth's kid sister in Music in My Heart (1940). Fellows also starred in four features as Polly Pepper, the eldest of five kids surviving without parents, in the Five Little Peppers series (1939-40). After Columbia failed to renew her contract – at 18, she was deemed over the hill – Fellows made a few films, including two Gene Autry westerns, Heart of the Rio Grande and Stardust on the Sage (both 1942), again as juvenile pests.
In 1946 Fellows married the talent agent Freddie Fields, with whom she had a daughter, but the breakdown of the marriage in the mid-50s contributed to a psychological crisis. In 1958, she was appearing in a benefit performance in New York and suddenly felt unable to move her legs. A psychiatrist diagnosed "incurable stage fright" and prescribed the antidepressant Librium. This led to years of dependence on the drug, alcoholism and a second failed marriage.
In the late 1970s, Rudy Venz, a playwright and director at a Los Angeles community theatre, wrote a play based on her life called Dreams Deferred, in which Fellows played herself. "The moment I walked out on stage, it was like going through a doorway," Fellows said. "The adrenaline was flowing. I had no leg problems, no sweating from nerves. I just knew that I was home."
This gave her the confidence to take more roles on television (including ER, St Elsewhere and Cagney & Lacey) and to play the costume designer Edith Head in the TV biopic Grace Kelly (1983), in which there was no trace of the naughty young girl who had cheered up Depression-era audiences.
Fellows is survived by her daughter, Kathy, and granddaughter, Natalie.
• Edith Marilyn Fellows, actor, born 20 May 1923; died 26 June 2011
Fellows, born in Boston, had a domineering paternal grandmother, who was left to take care of the two-month-old baby, whose mother had walked out on the family and disappeared. The grandmother later barred Edith's mostly absent father, a mechanic, from seeing his daughter when she got into the movies. "She did not want anyone around me," Fellows explained. "No one. Just the two of us."
In 1935, when Fellows was at the height of her fame, her mother suddenly turned up, accused the grandmother of kidnapping her child, and sued for custody of her daughter and control of her earnings. "She wanted my money, past, present and future," explained Fellows. In the end, Fellows chose to stay with her grandmother, rather than her equally "cold and tough" mother, testifying that she was "not used to loving strangers".
Her considerable earnings were placed in a trust, but when she turned 21, with her film career over, Fellows found that only $900 out of around $150,000 remained. She never discovered where the money had gone, but always blamed the missing thousands on her mother.
It all started when her grandmother enrolled the four-year-old Fellows at a dancing school in South Carolina, where the child proved to be a gifted dancer, singer and mimic. Hoping to fulfil her own acting ambitions by proxy, the grandmother decided they should move to Hollywood, following the trail of thousands of youngsters seeking stardom. One day, when Fellows accompanied a neighbour's son to an audition at Hal Roach studios, she began dancing and singing in front of the director without being asked. It was enough to get her a contract.
Fellows's first film was a hilarious Charley Chase silent short called Movie Night (1929), in which she played Charley's brat of a daughter on a family visit to the movies. Fellows then appeared in a couple of Our Gang comedies, Shivering Shakespeare (1930) and Mush and Milk (1933), although these were not enough to consecrate her as a member of the celebrated troupe. After small roles, usually as orphans, Fellows had the dubious distinction of playing Adele Rochester in Jane Eyre (1934), Monogram studios' flagrantly unfaithful version of Charlotte Brontë's novel. To her credit, Fellows managed a reasonable semblance of an English accent (Adele is not French in this adaptation) and makes the most of the extended role playing a little matchmaker between her guardian Edward Rochester (Colin Clive) and Jane Eyre (inappropriately portrayed by glamorous blonde Virginia Bruce).
In the same year, she appeared in Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Although WC Fields as a mail-order bridegroom provided most of the comedy, Fellows stemmed some of the sentimentality as Australia Wiggs, one of five children being brought up in a shanty town by their poverty-stricken mother, whose husband had deserted her. But it was her performance in Gregory La Cava's She Married Her Boss (1935) as Melvyn Douglas's deceitful little monster of a daughter, tamed when Claudette Colbert "spanks the daylight out of her" with a hairbrush, that deservedly earned Fellows a seven-year contract with Columbia studios.
She was cast again as a spoilt brat in And So They Were Married (1936), this time trying to keep her divorced mother (Mary Astor) from remarrying. In Pennies from Heaven (also 1936), Fellows is fine as a tough, precocious waif protected by Bing Crosby's singing vagabond. Her tantrums are abated this time, not with a spanking, but with the soothing crooning of Crosby, particularly the title song sung to her during a thunderstorm.
Columbia then continued to typecast her in the title roles of B-pictures such as Tugboat Princess (1936), Little Miss Roughneck (1938) and The Little Adventuress (1938), the last publicising her as "your favourite cyclone in curls". In contrast, Fellows had the rare chance to sing and play it sweet as Rita Hayworth's kid sister in Music in My Heart (1940). Fellows also starred in four features as Polly Pepper, the eldest of five kids surviving without parents, in the Five Little Peppers series (1939-40). After Columbia failed to renew her contract – at 18, she was deemed over the hill – Fellows made a few films, including two Gene Autry westerns, Heart of the Rio Grande and Stardust on the Sage (both 1942), again as juvenile pests.
In 1946 Fellows married the talent agent Freddie Fields, with whom she had a daughter, but the breakdown of the marriage in the mid-50s contributed to a psychological crisis. In 1958, she was appearing in a benefit performance in New York and suddenly felt unable to move her legs. A psychiatrist diagnosed "incurable stage fright" and prescribed the antidepressant Librium. This led to years of dependence on the drug, alcoholism and a second failed marriage.
In the late 1970s, Rudy Venz, a playwright and director at a Los Angeles community theatre, wrote a play based on her life called Dreams Deferred, in which Fellows played herself. "The moment I walked out on stage, it was like going through a doorway," Fellows said. "The adrenaline was flowing. I had no leg problems, no sweating from nerves. I just knew that I was home."
This gave her the confidence to take more roles on television (including ER, St Elsewhere and Cagney & Lacey) and to play the costume designer Edith Head in the TV biopic Grace Kelly (1983), in which there was no trace of the naughty young girl who had cheered up Depression-era audiences.
Fellows is survived by her daughter, Kathy, and granddaughter, Natalie.
• Edith Marilyn Fellows, actor, born 20 May 1923; died 26 June 2011
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