Shirley Temple Curls Rewarded: SAG Life Achievement Award

Shirley Temple curls finally rewarded: Next SAG Life Achievement Award recipient

Shirley Temple, the biggest curly-haired child star in film history, is now a grown woman. In fact, she has been one for quite some time. The 77-year-old Temple, in fact, has been named the next recipient of the Screen Actors Guild’s Life Achievement Award, which will be presented to her at the SAG Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Jan. 12. (Image: Shirley Temple now.)

Shirley Temple has the distinction of being the youngest Academy Award winner – a special miniature Oscar handed her in 1935, when she was six – and the United States’ top box office draw of the 1930s. Her movies during that period, almost invariably at 20th Century Fox, include titles such as Little Miss Marker (1934), which made her a star; Now and Forever (1935), as the little girl between Carole Lombard and Gary Cooper; and the John Ford-directed Wee Willie Winkie (1937).

Shirley Temple: Republican political roles

Temple’s film career petered out when she was still in her 20s, but since then she has been active in politics during several Republican administrations. Among her political roles were U.S. delegate to the 24th U.N. General Assembly and U.S. ambassador to Ghana.

Currently known as Shirley Temple Black – her husband of 55 years, Charles Black, died last August 4 – the former Fox star has been working on her second book of memoirs. The first, titled Child Star (1988), covers her movie career from the early 1930s to 1949, and her life up to 1954.

SAG’s Life Achievement Award winners

Previous recipients of SAG’s Life Achievement Award include Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, Gregory Peck, Pearl Bailey, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Robert Redford, Elizabeth Taylor, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Nanette Fabray, Danny Kaye, and last year’s James Garner.

Source for the Shirley Temple / SAG Life Achievement Award news: Army Archerd in Daily Variety.

“Shirley Temple now” photo: Screen Actors Guild.

Greta Garbo centenary

The Local reports that the Swedish Film Institute is celebrating Greta Garbo’s centenary with a retrospective of her films, including rare shorts in which the elusive star appeared long before her days in Hollywood.

(Note: the article erroneously states that the series encompasses all of Garbo’s work; that is not so, though the SFI will screen a wide range of films, accompanying Garbo from her days in Europe to her last Hollywood picture, the unfairly maligned comedy Two-Faced Woman [1941]).

As per the Local article, at the start of the festival Film Institute director Åse Clevelandintroduced Mauritz Stiller’s Gösta Berlings Saga / The Atonement of Gosta Berling (1924) — which boasted a new score by Matti Bye — remarking that “even in Norway, Garbo is still front page news.”

Greta Garbo would have turned 100 this past September 18. She died on April 15, 1990, at the age of 84.