Marilyn Knowlden, Famed Child Actress in Six Best Picture Nominees, Dies at 99

Marilyn Knowlden, Famed Child Actress in Six Best Picture Nominees, Dies at 99

Marilyn Knowlden, the busy child actress of the 1930s and ’40s who appeared in Little Women with Katharine Hepburn, Imitation of Life with Claudette Colbert, Les Misérables with Fredric March and in three other Oscar best picture nominees, has died. She was 99.

Knowlden died Monday of natural causes at an assisted living facility in Eagle, Idaho, her son Kevin Goates told The Hollywood Reporter.

During a career in Hollywood that spanned just 1931-44 but included more than three dozen pictures, Knowlden collaborated with Colbert, Hepburn, Irene Dunne and Norma Shearer as her onscreen moms in Imitation of Life (1934), A Woman Rebels (1936), Show Boat (1936) and Marie Antoinette (1938), respectively.

“A special relationship can develop with the actress who plays a child’s mother, even if that bond is temporary,” she told author Nick Thomas in 2016.

Another highlight for Knowlden included a turn as a younger version of Ann Sheridan’s character in the classic Michael Curtiz-directed Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

Her other best picture nominees were George Cukor’s David Copperfield (1935), where she portrayed Lewis Stone’s piano-playing daughter alongside Freddie Bartholomew; Mervyn LeRoy’s Anthony Adverse (1936), starring March and Olivia de Havilland; and Anatole Litvak’s All This, and Heaven Too (1940), starring Bette Davis and Charles Boyer. None of her movies won the top Oscar, however.

Knowlden always worked as a freelancer, never under contract at any studio.

“Well, my father was very much in control of my career, and he didn’t want me to be under contract,” she told Danny Miller in a 2018 interview for Cinephiled. “I think one of the reasons is that if you’re a child under contract, you have to go to the studio school, and there goes your normal life. I think he was very happy to have things the way they were.”

An only child, Knowlden was born on May 12, 1926, in Oakland, California. When her dad, San Francisco attorney Robert Knowlden Jr., had a business trip to Hollywood in 1931, he brought his wife, Bertha, and her with him.

“On the second day there, just for fun, my father decided to call some of the studios,” she recalled. “I had been doing some little acting things in Oakland, and my teacher there had told my father that she thought I should be in the movies, so he thought he’d give it a try.”

Her fast-talking dad reached Paramount head of casting Fred Datig, who arranged for an interview that day. The part of Paul Lukas’ and Eleanor Boardman’s daughter in the early talkie Women Love Once (1931) was discussed, but Datig thought Knowlden was too young. However, she showed she was capable of handling many pages of dialogue.

Plus, Boardman “much preferred the idea of a 4-year-old in the part since she didn’t want people to think she was old enough to have an 8-year-old!” she said. And so, the blue-eyed Knowlden was hired the next day. (Her dad eventually put aside his law practice to serve as her full-time agent.)

Hours after she learned she got the job, Knowlden was in a car with her folks when it was involved in a crash in front of the Vitaphone Studios lot in Los Feliz. On the scene was actress Dolores Costello, the wife of John Barrymore, who escorted Knowlden to her dressing room and cared for her. (While she was just bruised, her mom suffered three broken ribs and a broken collarbone in the accident.)

During production on Women Love Once, director Edward Goodman took Knowlden to another soundstage to visit The Marx Brothers, then at work on Monkey Business (1931). “I loved that and ended up playing a duet with Chico on the piano,” she said. “He told me, ‘I’ll play this note and you play these notes when I nod to you.’”

Women Love Once would prove to be the first of her six films released in 1931, followed by The Cisco Kid, Husband’s Holiday, Susan Lenox — that one with Clark Gable and Greta Garbo — Wicked and Once a Lady.

She acted with Hepburn for the first time in 1933 in Morning Glory and Cukor’s Little Women, and in A Woman Rebels, she got to use a bow and arrow.

“Miss Hepburn promised me a dollar if I could hit a bull’s-eye,” she told Miller. “At the end of the film, she signed an autograph for me that says, ‘To Marilyn — Hoping that her archery improves. Affectionately, Katharine Hepburn.’ I cherish that to this day, especially since I found out later how rarely she would give her autograph.”

She and Rochelle Hudson shared the roles of Jessie Pullman in John M. Stahl’s Imitation of Life and Cosette in Richard Boleslawski’s Les Misérables (1935).

It got to the point where Knowlden hardly had to audition. “I went on very few cattle calls,” she said. “Usually I would just go on interviews where they were already seriously considering me for a part.”

She even had a doll in her likeness made of her.

Her résumé included two films with Shirley Temple, As the Earth Turns (1934) and Just Around the Corner (1938), plus The World Changes (1933), Rainbow on the River (1936), The Way of All Flesh (1940) and Broadway Rhythm (1944), her final feature.

One movie she didn’t get was Gone With the Wind (1939), though she was in the running to play Scarlett O’Hara’s youngest sister, Carreen. “I so wanted to be in that movie!” she said. “But I lost the part to Ann Rutherford.”

Knowlden graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1943, then earned a scholarship to Mills College in Oakland. She married serviceman Richard Goates in 1946, went with him to China and Japan and worked for the Armed Forces Radio Service.

Later, she wrote music, lyrics and scripts for several musicals; returned to acting in plays and musicals in San Diego County including Arsenic and Old Lace, Sorry, Wrong Number and My Fair Lady; and published her autobiography, Little Girl in Big Pictures, in 2011.

In addition to her son Kevin, survivors include her daughter, Carolyn, and another son, Brian; her grandchildren, Jessica, Maureen and Shelisa; and 12 great-grandchildren.