Shirley Temple, 1928 – 2014, remembered in The Spectator

Shirley Temple has died in California at the age of 85. She was known as America’s little darling after she appeared in her first film at the age of three. Later in life she moved into politics, running for Congress and joining the diplomatic corps. Henry Kissinger, she said, was surprised she knew where Ghana was, but she became ambassador to Ghana and later to Czechoslovakia.

As for her films, Graham Greene, reviewing Shirley Temple’s latest performance in August 1936, was rather shocked:

Captain January, the latest Shirley Temple picture, is sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent… Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance, but some of her popularity seems to rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss Colbert’s, and on an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey-flannel trousers as Miss Dietrich’s.