Mickey Kuhn, the busy little one actor of the Thirties and ’40s who performed Beau Wilkes, the son of Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard’s characters, in Gone With the Wind, has died. He was 90.
Kuhn died Sunday in a hospice facility in Naples, Florida, his spouse, Barbara, instructed The Hollywood Reporter. He was in glorious well being till lately, she stated.
Kuhn additionally portrayed the ward of a well-known film cop in Dick Tracy (1945) and youthful variations of Kirk Douglas and Montgomery Clift in The Unusual Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and John Wayne’s Purple River (1948), respectively.
And in A Streetcar Named Need (1951), Kuhn reunited with GWTW actress Vivien Leigh to look as a sailor who provides Blanche DuBois instructions. (Was he Leigh’s good luck allure? She received her two finest actress Oscars with him within the forged.)
Kuhn was 6 when he made Gone With the Wind (1939), and in a 2014 interview with The Washington Submit, he recalled how he stored flubbing a scene with Clark Gable. “My line was, ‘Hi there, Uncle Rhett,’” he said. “I stored saying, ‘Hi there, Uncle Clark.’” It took him a couple of takes to get it proper.
In one other scene, Kuhn seems within the arms of his father, Ashley (Howard), outdoors the bed room the place his mother, Melanie (de Havilland), is deathly in poor health. “The place is my mom going away to? And why can’t I am going alongside, please?” he asks.
He by no means appeared onscreen with de Havilland and stated he didn’t meet her till she celebrated her ninetieth birthday in California in 2006. After that, he known as her yearly on her birthday, he told the Naples Each day Information in 2017.
In all, Kuhn labored in six movies launched in 1939, together with King of the Underworld, starring Humphrey Bogart; Juarez, that includes Bette Davis and Paul Muni (he made $100 per week for taking part in a Mexican crown prince, he stated); and When Tomorrow Comes, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer.
His big-screen résumé additionally included two James Stewart movies, Magic City (1947) and Damaged Arrow (1950), in addition to I Need a Divorce (1940), One Foot in Heaven (1941), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Looking Wind (1946), Excessive Conquest (1947) and Scene of the Crime (1949).
From proper: Mickey Kuhn, James Stewart, Debra Paget and Jeff Chandler in 1950’s Damaged Arrow.
twentieth Century Fox/Photofest
Theodore Matthew Michael Kuhn Jr. was born on Sept. 21, 1932, in Waukegan, Illinois. He and his household moved to Los Angeles, the place his father would work as a meat cutter for Safeway. At age 2, he appeared as an adopted child in Change of Coronary heart (1934), starring Janet Gaynor.
“My mom and I had been in Sears Roebuck on Santa Monica and Western when a woman stopped my mom and stated that Fox Studio was searching for twin infants for a film they had been capturing,” he said in a 2008 interview for the web site Movies of the Golden Age. “She had a child lady that seemed lots like me and thought we might be forged. Effectively, we went over there, and I, however not the woman’s child, was forged.”
His mother and father enrolled him within the Mar-Ken College for show-business children, and he was buddies with brothers Darryl and Dwayne Hickman.
After a day at work at Republic Footage on S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939), he and his mother went to Culver Metropolis to interview for Gone With the Wind. There have been “sixty to eighty children and adults on the casting workplace,” he remembered.
“I began crying and wished to go away, however Mother stated to go up and provides my title to the woman on the desk. If in 10 minutes I hadn’t been known as, then we would go away. I went to the woman and stated, ‘I’m Mickey Kuhn.’ She stated, ‘Mickey, we’ve been ready for you.’ After which to the others ready, ‘Thanks, we’ve forged the half. You might all go away.’”
The Purple River script known as for Wayne to smack him. “He truly hit me backhanded,” Kuhn stated. “He instructed me he was [going to do it]. He stated it could look higher that manner. We did it in a single take.”
In 1951, Kuhn started a four-year stint within the U.S. Navy and labored as an plane electrician. After the service, he appeared in The Final Frontier (1955) and Away All Boats (1956) and on three 1957 episodes of CBS’ Alfred Hitchcock Presents earlier than calling it quits as an actor.
He labored in airport administration for American Airways and at terminals in Washington and Boston earlier than retiring in 1995.
Along with his spouse, whom he married in 1985, survivors embrace his son, Mick (and his spouse, Jolene), daughter Patricia and granddaughter Samantha.
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