Marilyn Knowlden, who as a bright-eyed, Depression-era child actress appeared in dozens of movies featuring stars like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, played a piano duet with Chico Marx and danced with Charles Laughton, died on Sept. 15 in Eagle, Idaho. She was 99.
She died at an assisted-living facility, her daughter, Carolyn Goates, said.
Ms. Knowlden’s screen odyssey began at 4, when she took a screen test on a lark during a family trip to Hollywood. She was subsequently cast most often as verbally precocious or well-mannered moppets in more than 30 films spanning drama and more whimsical fare; six were best-picture Oscar nominees.
They included “Little Women,” the 1933 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, starring Ms. Hepburn; “Imitation of Life” (1934), a pioneering drama about family loyalties and race with Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers; “Les Misérables” (1935), in which she was the young Cosette alongside Fredric March and Charles Laughton; the star-studded 1935 version of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” (1935), as the sincere young Agnes (played as an adult by Madge Evans); “Anthony Adverse” (1936), a historical adventure with Mr. March and Olivia de Havilland; and “All This, and Heaven Too” (1940) a romance starring Ms. Davis and Charles Boyer.
Playing the daughter of Ms. Hepburn’s character in the historical drama “A Woman Rebels” (1936), Ms. Knowlden tried to master the bow and arrow for a scene. Ms. Hepburn “would give me a dollar if I could hit the bull’s-eye,” she recalled to the interviewer Nick Thomas in 2015. “I never did get my dollar. But I did get a nice autograph: ‘Dear Marilyn, hoping your archery will improve, affectionately, Katharine Hepburn.’ I still have that.”
Offscreen, she met the Marx Brothers in 1931, when they were on a set next door making the anarchic comedy “Monkey Business.” Chico “sat me down at the piano and taught me to play a few notes,” she told Mr. Thomas. “We even played a duet together.”
Four years later, on the set of “Les Misérables,” she instructed Mr. Laughton, playing Inspector Javert, how to do a few dance steps. “He was wearing his hip-length boots, and I was wearing wooden shoes, and I taught him a little wooden shoe dance,” she said.
Ms. Knowlden never approached the marquee-topping fame of Shirley Temple, the reigning child actress of the day. But the two crossed paths professionally, including in “As the Earth Turns,” a 1934 drama about an immigrant farm family in Maine. Ms. Temple made an uncredited appearance in the movie just before she became a cheery song-and-dance phenomenon.
Ms. Knowlden went on to act in a second film with Ms. Temple, “Just Around the Corner” (1938), and by then, with Ms. Temple now famous, Ms. Knowlden could glimpse the pressures of major child stardom.
“It was a little hard on the rest of us because we wanted to play with her, but she was off in her own little bungalow,” Ms. Knowlden told the film site Cinephiled. “She didn’t even get to eat with the other kids.”
In contrast, Ms. Knowlden’s parents did not even take her to see her own films, fearful that she would develop a titanic ego. Her father, who managed her career, refused to let her be bound by a studio contract.
As a result, “I was always a freelance actor, so I had complete freedom to choose my roles,” she told Mr. Thomas. “If you were under contract like Judy Garland or Shirley Temple, you went to a studio school and really lost your ordinary life. I went to public school, had a very normal life, and then occasionally would go off and make a film.”
Marilyn Knowlden was born on May 12, 1926, in Oakland, Calif., the only child of Robert E. Knowlden Jr., a lawyer, and Bertha (McKenzie) Knowlden.
In 1931, her father brought the family along on a business trip to Los Angeles and decided on a whim to call Paramount Pictures about giving Marilyn a screen test; she got one the next day. Soon she won a brief speaking part as the daughter of the stars Paul Lukas and Eleanor Boardman in “Women Love Once,” released later that year. Sometimes uncredited, she made at least four more movies for various studios in 1931 alone.
Moving his family to Los Angeles, her father became a talent agent with an office on the storied corner of Hollywood and Vine.
Ms. Knowlden’s other notable films included the adaptation of the stage musical “Show Boat” (1936), starring Irene Dunne, Allan Jones and Paul Robeson; the lavish biopic “Marie Antoinette” (1938), with Norma Shearer; and “Angels With Dirty Faces,” (1938), the gangster picture starring James Cagney, Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart.
Like those of many child performers, her career waned as she entered adolescence. She graduated from Beverly Hills High School, then spent three years studying music at Mills College in Oakland. She left school in 1946 to marry Richard Goates, who in World War II fought with the jungle-warfare combat unit known as Merrill’s Marauders, later the subject of a 1962 film.
Settling in Fallbrook, Calif., a mountain town in San Diego County, Ms. Knowlden turned her creative energies to music and theater, writing plays and composing songs for local productions. In 2011, she released her autobiography, “Little Girl in Big Pictures.”
In addition to her daughter Carolyn, she is survived by two sons, Brian and Kevin; a foster daughter, Liz; three grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren. She and Mr. Goates divorced in 1978. Her second husband, Eliseo Busnardo, whom she married 1978, died in 2010.
Ms. Knowlden acknowledged one rare disappointment in her otherwise fruitful childhood film career: Her scenes in “Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise),” a 1931 fallen-woman melodrama starring Greta Garbo as Ms. Knowlden’s governess, ended up on the cutting room floor.
Afterward, she told Mr. Thomas, Ms. Garbo took her aside to offer advice that she came to embrace: “In Hollywood, don’t count on anything!”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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