Cora Sue Collins. Children’s star that harass

Sometimes it is death that brings us the news of a long lost youth. An innocence of a time much prior to ours. After all, who says something today, the name of Cora Sue Collins? It’s her turn, where she can often be the worst news of the newspaper. But who remembers this childish actress who from the early 1930s appeared in half a hundred films in a 13 -year space, contrasting with stars such as Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, before interrupting her career after being sexually harassed by a screenwriter? Collins died on April 27 after complications of a stroke. I was 98 years old. He had swept from the popular imagination, and few will remember the times when the plump, known for his dimples, was part of a constellation of children’s stars that included Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Collins, who made 11 films in 1934 and another 11 in 1935, disappeared suddenly from public attention, but from time to time still with some nostalgia that period. « It should have a very common face, » he told an interview in 2014 to the online newspaper Film Talk. He added: “In a child, I made all kinds of papers. I think they could make up and make me go through any kind person. But I hope they weren’t paying me without me doing something for it. The movies were incredibly magical to me at that time. »

He developed a friendship with Garbo, which began in the scenario of Queen Christina, in which Collins played Garbo as a child on the acclaimed 1933 movie about the Swedish monarch. The connection between the two deepened when he was then chosen to make his niece in Anna Karenina (1935), having persisted for time to her adult visits to Garbo’s homes in New York and Paris.

A Collins profile published in 1935 on The Oakland Tribune realized that she had a 151 IQ and had been elected Hollywood’s most popular children’s actress for her peers. The author of the profile, Marion Simms, was with the Collins one morning when actor Pat O’Brien, who had become friends with Cora Sue and whom she called ‘Uncle Pat’, went there to take her to school. Collins also opposed James Cagney in Picture Snatcher (1933), Bette Davis in All This, and Heaven Too (1940), Colleen Moore in The Scarlet Letter (1934) and Sylvia Sidney in Jennie Gerhardt (1933). However, and as it usually happens to so many other children’s stars, adolescence proved to be fatal to him, and the papers were decreasing. It was so quite discouraged when, shortly before her 17th birthday, she was a victim of harassment when Harry Ruskin, a MGM Cruising that she saw as a paternal figure, offered her a big role if she slept with him. She refused, started to cry and knocked on that office’s door and everyone else in Hollywood.

« I would have given my right arm to have that role, » she acknowledged to Film Masters, a consortium of historians and film enthusiasts in 2024. He also said that after that meeting, he reported Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, to which she was contractually linked. But the answer he received from this was: « You will get used to you, dear. » Shortly thereafter, Mayer lost her patience and threatened her from returning to work in the movies.

«Mr. Mayer, this is actually my desire, ”she told him, adding in such an interview: » It was the best decision of my life. « 

There the dream was died, then, gradually, the brightness and, finally, the memory of the so many roles it played.

Cora Sue Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, Western Virginia. The parents separated when she was 3 years old, after her mother found out that her father had offered a vision coat to her secretary at Christmas. Cora Sue and her older sister were taken by her mother to Hollywood by train. And it didn’t take long for the dream to kidnap her. Once, when her mother was going to enroll her sister at school, a huge car approached them and inside jumped a woman who said, « Sorry, would you like to put your daughter on the big screen? » So he reported Collins in an interview with Cinephiled in 2015. “Of course my mother said, ‘Yes!’ And the woman replied, ‘Enter the car with me, a great casting is taking place at Universal.’