Child star who worked with Greta Garbo
Cora Sue Collins (pictured right), who has died aged 98, was one of a galaxy of child stars who were contracted to MGM in the 1930s. She was never the shiniest of them, said The New York Times: the likes of Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple were better known. But over 13 years from 1932, when she made her debut as a "chubby-cheeked" four-year-old, she appeared in nearly 50 films, and acted alongside some of the biggest stars of the period.
In 1933, Greta Garbo hand-picked Collins to play her as a child in "Queen Christina". Dubbed "Baby Garbo", she got on well with the reclusive star, who often invited her for tea in her lavish suite on the MGM lot. The pair worked together again two years later, on "Anna Karenina", and kept in touch until Garbo's death in 1990. She also played the younger selves of Frances Dee, Merle Oberon and Norma Shearer, and the child of both Claudette Colbert and Myrna Loy. "I must have the most common face in the world," she said in 2019. "They made me up to look like everybody."
Cora Sue Collins was born in West Virginia in 1927. When she was three, her mother discovered that her father had given his secretary a mink coat, and took her and her sister to live in Los Angeles. In an interview in 2015, Collins recalled that, three days after arriving in the city, they were going to register at a school when a huge car pulled up. "A woman jumped out of the car and said, 'Excuse me, would you like to put your little girl in pictures?' Of course, my mother said, 'Yes!' The woman said, 'Get in the car with me, there's a big casting going on right now at Universal.'" She auditioned, and won a part that had been due to go to Judy Garland. The critics were delighted by her performance ("Just four, she walks away with everything," wrote one) and directors were impressed by her professionalism. On the set of one of her first films, her character was meant to burst into tears – so two burly men rushed onto the set and dragged her mother away. The director looked at her and asked, "'Well, aren't you going to cry?' And I said, 'If you want me to cry, why don't you just tell me to and give me a minute to think of something sad?'"
In 1934, she signed a contract with MGM for $250 a week (about $6,000 in today's money); she was in ten films that year, and 11 the next. To mark her eighth birthday, the studio threw her a joint party with the veteran actress May Robson, which was attended by everyone from Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow to Freddie Bartholomew. Donald O'Connor gave her a horned toad and, when she told the press that she needed dead flies to feed it, fans sent "huge shipments" of them to the studio. But it was hard graft: she worked six days a week and, on Sundays, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer would make her do odd jobs, such as teaching his grandchildren to ride. "I really had no childhood at all," she said.
When she was 16, the screenwriter Harry Ruskin, who was 33 years her senior, and whom she regarded as a mentor, allegedly told her that, to get a part in his next film, she'd have to have sex with him. She went straight to Mayer, who just said, "You'll get used to it." She appeared in one more film, with Ginger Rogers, then quit acting for good – a decision she described as the best of her life. After that, she spent decades as an "anonymous housewife", which was lovely, she said. She had three children. But in her last few years, she had become increasingly sought after, as one of the links to Hollywood's golden era. In interviews, she reminisced about that period, and the stars who'd been kind to her as a child: Garbo, of course, but also Pat O'Brien, "who I loved so much"; Bette Davis, "so sweet"; William Powell, "a close friend until his death"; and Peter Lorre, "a sweet, dear man".
