The paper of record ran a nice obit for Peter Lovesey. (Previously.)
Cora Sue Collins, actress. She was 98.
Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, West Virginia. Her mom brought her and her older sister to Los Angeles just before Collins turned 4.
“On the third day we were here, I went with my mother to enroll my older sister in school,” she told Danny Miller in a wonderful 2015 interview. “We were walking up to the entrance of the school, my sister and I each holding one of my mother’s hands, when this huge car came screeching up.
“A woman jumped out of the car and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to put your little girl in pictures?’ Of course my mother said, ‘Yes!’ The woman said, ‘Get in the car with me, there’s a big casting going on right now at Universal.’”
They made it on their own to the studio, where Collins was quickly tapped to play Pudge in the 1932 comedy The Unexpected Father, starring ZaSu Pitts and Slim Summerville. “Wait till you see Cora Sue,” wrote one reviewer of her performance. “Just four, she walks away with everything.”
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…Collins portrayed Sylvia Sidney’s daughter in Jennie Gerhardt and was the main attraction at the premiere of Queen Christina at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where she was accompanied by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer after arriving in a miniature coach pulled by Shetland ponies. (Garbo refused to do any publicity for her films.)
Collins signed a contract with MGM in 1934 for $250 a week — about $5,900 in today’s dollars — and appeared in 10 features that year, including Black Moon with Fay Wray, The Scarlet Letter with Colleen Moore, The World Accuses with Dickie Moore and Treasure Island with Jackie Cooper.
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