Farewell Shirley Temple

Former Hollywood child star Shirley Temple has died at the age of 85.

She died on Monday at home in Woodside, California, from natural causes. 
"She was surrounded by her family and caregivers," a statement said.

Temple is the child star of the 1930s. They played already tiny lead roles on the silver screen with her golden blonde curls. In the thirties and forties of the last century plays them in dozens of films. Between 1936 and 1938 she is even the most successful artist in Hollywood.

She was born on 23 April 1928, and takes on her third song-and-dance lessons. The young girl is already out for its professionalism. If they are less than four years old, she has been featured in a series of films called Baby Burlesques creations. Temple later describes this series of films as a "cynical exploitation of child-like innocence, every now and then also racist and sexist".

In the crisis years 30 is the public en masse for her cheerful, disarming smile and the dimples in her cheeks. Shirley Temple breaks through with the film Stand up and Cheer, in which she sings the song Baby Take a Bow . That movie is made at the studio of Fox, that in those years suffers. In 1934 the youth asterisk signs a contract with Fox and saves the company with successful films such as The Little Colonel and Heidi.

Temple receives an Academy Award In 1935 for her role in the film Bright Eyes, in which they first On the Good Ship Lollipop sings. They may also put her hand-and footprints in the tiles for the famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

The height of her career she experiences in 1939, as The Little Princess is released in color. But at the age of twelve the star burnt out. Her parents buy her studio contract and send her to an exclusive girl's school.

She does not disappear right away from the public stage and still occasionally appears in a TV series. A big comeback is not in it. In 1950 she pulls back from the film and television world. She married her second husband, a wealthy businessman. Then they twenty years disappears completely out of the spotlight.

In the late 1960s, she is politically active for the Republican Party. She does in 1967 a stab at a Congressional seat, but not wins. After a trip through Europe in order to obtain support for presidential candidate Richard Nixon, she is rewarded by him with a new feature: American representative to the United Nations.

Temple is appointed Ambassador of the United States in 1974. First in Ghana (1974-1976), then in the former Czecho-Slovakia (1989-1992).

Temple gets breast cancer in 1972. This makes her one of the first top women who talk openly about the disease. She past away Monday a natural death at her home in California at the age of 85.