Trivia of Shirley Temple

Trivia of Shirley Temple (23 April 1928 - 10 February 2014)

*She was just 3 years old when she was discovered at her dance school by producers from Educational Films Corporation and contracted by them to appear in the low-budget movies that satirized adult roles and featured all-kid casts, Baby Burlesks.

*At age 6 she became the first recipient of the juvenile Academy Award. To this day she is the youngest person ever to receive an Academy Award. After receiving her award from actor/writer Irvin S. Cobb, she politely thanked him, then turned to her mother and asked, "Mommy, can I go home now?".

*Before Judy Garland, Temple was considered to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.But she was under contract at 20th Century Fox and the studio would not release her to work for MGM, which produced Oz. Fox had previously lent her to Paramount, where she appeared in such hits as Little Miss Marker and Now and Forever, and as a result was determined to keep their bankable star on a tight leash.

*She was nearly assassinated in 1939. A woman tried to assassinate Temple while she was singing “Silent Night” on a live radio show under the logic that the 10-year-old had swiped her daughter’s soul and shooting her would unleash it. She recalled the event during a 1998 news conference at the American Booksellers Association in Anaheim, Calif.Temple said a woman “pulled out a rather big gun and started to point it” at her while she was singing during the radio appearance at CBS in Hollywood. Temple said at the time police grabbed the woman and removed her from the studio.

*In her memoir “Child Star,” Temple claimed that an MGM producer, who was known to have an “adventuresome casting couch," unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to her during their first meeting in 1940. She was 12. Being innocent of male anatomy, she responded with nervous laughter and he threw her out of his office.

*In 1988, Temple revealed in an interview televised on “Entertainment Tonight” that Ronald Reagan was really a good kisser. “He was one of the best kissers,” she declared. The two performed together in the 1947 film “That Hagen Girl” where her character feared that the teacher played by the future president was her illegitimate father. Despite the on-screen chemistry, the film was “probably one of the worst movies either one of us ever made,” said Temple.

*In her adult life, she become part of government.In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon appointed her a U.S. delegate to the United Nations. Five years later, she served as U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, and from 1989 to 1992 as President George H.W. Bush’s U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Under the leadership of President Gerald R. Ford, she became the first woman named U.S. Chief of Protocol. Another first was her appointment as Honorary U.S. Foreign Service Officer in 1988.