1930s child actress Cora Sue Collins, 98, died on April 27. Collins made her film debut in 1932, and through the decade costarred with Greta Garbo (Anna Karenina, and as the young Queen Christina), Norma Shearer (Smilin’ Through), James Cagney (Picture Snatcher), Kay Francis (Mary Stevens, M.D.), Claudette Colbert (Torch Singer), Loretta Young (Caravan), William Powell and Myrna Loy (Evelyn Prentice), Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy (Naughty Marietta) and Peter Lorre (Mad Love). Her career slowed, but continued through the 1940s (All This and Heaven Too, Blood and Sand, Get Hep to Love, Week-End at the Waldorf) before she retired at the age of 18, after, she said, being attacked by screenwriter Harry Ruskin. Collins married a rancher and moved to Nevada; though she was rarely interviewed, she did not become a recluse and occasionally showed up at nostalgia conventions in later years. “In retrospect,” she said, “I enjoyed those years because what little girl doesn’t like to play dress-up and be costumed by the most famous designers in the world? It took me a long time… to understand that the life I lived was really a wonderful life.”
