Marilyn Knowlden, a child star from Hollywood's Golden Age who shared the screen with Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, and other legends, has passed away. She was 99.
Knowlden died at an assisted living facility in Eagle, Idaho, her son told the Hollywood Reporter.
In a career spanning a little over a decade, Knowlden was constantly in demand, appearing in no fewer than six Oscar-nominated movies. Some of her biggest roles were in film adaptations of literary classics, including Little Women, Les Misérables, and David Copperfield.
Born an only child in Oakland, California, Knowlden took to acting at age four while visiting Hollywood with her father, who was on a business trip.
Within days of an interview with Paramount's head of casting, the young Knowlden had landed her first movie, Women Love Once (1931), an early talkie.
“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," she said in a 2018 interview.
Her father, who was then a lawyer, became her manager throughout a short-lived but prolific career that included 30 movies from 1931 to 1944.
She appeared in 1933's Little Women, starring Katharine Hepburn. In 1935's version of the Dickens classic David Copperfield, Knowlden played Agnes Wickfield, David's childhood friend and "good angel."
Knowlden's other notable roles include the exploited orphan Cosette in Les Misérables (1935) and the child version of the future love interest of James Cagney's Rocky in the crime drama Angels With Dirty Faces (1938).
Rather than signing with a major studio, Knowlden was a freelancer, which was unusual at the time.
"Well, my father was very much in control of my career, and he didn’t want me to be under contract,” she said. “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.”
After her movie career dwindled, Knowlden followed her first husband, US Army captain Richard Goates, to China and Japan, where she was a radio announcer for the American Forces Network.
Later in life, Knowlden - who studied music and drama at Mills College - wrote musicals, and she continued to appear in local stage productions.
She continued to be recognized for her work in movies well into old age, appearing at numerous film festivals. In 2011, she published an account of her remarkable life, Little Girl in Big Pictures.
