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Shirley Temple was born in Santa Monica, California in 1928. Her mother quickly saw her remarkable talent, and did all she could to develop it, and to get her noticed. She enrolled her in a dance school, where she amazed everyone with her dancing and singing abilities at such a young age. Her mother gave her a hair style imitative of that worn by Mary Pickford, with exactly 56 "ringlets". She appeared in her first movies starting when she was just shy of four years old, in a series called "Baby Burlesks" (she had apparently failed an audition for the Our Gang series). She was paid $10 a day. In 1934, she signed a contract with Fox, and her career really took off. Her big breakthrough came with Stand Up and Cheer!, where her singing and dancing amazed the nation. But she proved she was a remarkably poised actress that same year in Little Miss Marker and Baby Take a Bow, and Fox rushed her into as many movies as they could. That same year she was in Now and Forever with Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard (reportedly Cooper asked for her autograph when he met her!), and soon after she starred in the series of juvenile musicals she is best remembered for, films like Bright Eyes, The Little Colonel, Curly Top, Poor Little Rich Girl, Wee Willie Winkie, Heidi, and many more. In the late 1930s, Fox (now 20th Century Fox) still had her in little girl roles, even though she was rapidly maturing, and in 1939 MGM badly wanted her for the lead in The Wizard of Oz, but 20th Century Fox refused to loan her out, and instead put her in The Blue Bird, which did not do well. She left Fox, and began playing "teen" roles for various studios, but none were very successful, and she made far fewer movies. In 1945, she married actor John Agar, and they were married four years and had a child. In 1949, they divorced, and a year later she married businessman Charles Black, and retired from movies forever. She became active in politics (she was a Republican, and was appointed to several posts in the 1960s to 1990s). Shirley Temple was far and away the greatest child star of all time! She saved the Fox studio after the death of its previous greatest star, Will Rogers in 1935. She was merchandised in a zillion ways, and countless girls born in the late 1930s were named "Shirley". There has never been another child actor with so much talent at such a young age! AND Zero Mostel was born Samuel Joel Mostel in Brooklyn, New York in 1915. His father was an Orthodox Jew, and Sammy was one of eight children. After buying a farm and going broke, his father took his family to the Lower East Side, where Sammy grew up. Sammy was very artistic, and showed talent at painting, but there was no money in that, and he went to City College, and got a job giving tours of art museums. It was on that job he showed his talent at doing "stand-up comedy". He got a job as a comic in a night club (changing his name to Zero), and that led to some small theater and film roles. He was drafted by the Army, but when he got out he resumed entertaining in plays, musicals, operas and movies. His star kept rising, but unfortunately he had joined Communist groups, and he was swept up in the McCarthy blacklists. Unlike many others, he refused to "name names", and he was one of the few performers to question the government's right to do what it was doing while he was testifying. He worked little through the mid-1950s, but in 1957 he got a starring role on Broadway, and he won the Obie Award for Best Actor. Since the blacklists were starting to end, it seemed he was poised to be a leading star. But fate intervened when he was hit by a bus in New York City, and his leg was crushed, and it took him a long time to recover to where he could act again, and he was in pain the rest of his life (the City settled with him out of court). When he recovered he got major parts on Broadway, and then in 1962 he got the lead role of Pseudolus the slave who wants his freedom in the Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He won the Tony Award, and starred in the movie version in 1966. In 1964, he starred as Tevye the milkman in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. He again won the Tony Award, but this time he was NOT allowed to re-create the role in the movie version, a grievious mistake. In 1968, he was Max Bialystock in perhaps the funniest movie ever made, The Producers. The movie failed at the box office, but over time has achieved a massive cult following. He had a few more memorable appearances, among them as Morris Mishkin in The Angel Levine in 1970, as Abe Greenberg in The Hot Rock in 1972, and as Hecky Brown, a victim of blacklisting, in The Front, in 1976. He passed away in 1977. Mostel had a wonderful career filled with wonderful performances, but one wonders how much more he might have achieved had he not been blacklisted and had a serious accident that cost him some of his most productive years?

Important Added Info: Note that this still was used in Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon II", which was his second outrageous collection of stills he had collected over many years. In this one, Zero Mostel is captured in a candid moment leering at Shirley Temple's bust, and Anger added the caption "Shirley Temple has always elicited affection from older men. Zero Mostel is no exception."!

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