Child actor, Cora Sue Collins, has passed away age 98
Cora Sue Collins, a prolific Hollywood child actor in the 1930s, has passed away at her home in Beverly Hills, California. She was 98 years old. Her daughter, Susie McKay Krieser, revealed that her cause of death was complications of a stroke.
Collins performed in nearly 50 films in 13 years, including 11 in 1934 and 11 in 1935. She performed at the same time as Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland.
Her career in acting began with an almost magical tale. Miss Collins insisted that she was telling “the honest-to-God truth” when recounting how her mother and sister were heading to register her sister in school when a huge car pulled up alongside them.
“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.’”
Collins was subsequently cast in her first movie, 1932’s The Unexpected Father. She played an orphan whose new adoptive father hires a nurse, played by ZaSu Pitts, to care for her. The Kansas City Journal wrote of the film, “The little Collins girl walks away with the picture.”
She developed a friendship with A-list star Greta Garbo that began on the set of Queen Christina, the 1933 movie about the Swedish monarch. “Until she passed away, I called her Miss Garbo, and she called me Cora Sue, which was correct,” Collins told Film Talk.
In a 2014 interview, Collins laughed about her extensive acting history. “I must have had a very common face!” she said to the online journal. She added, “I played everybody as a child. I guess they could make me up to look like anyone. Yet I hope they weren’t paying me for nothing. Movies were incredibly magical to me back then.”
Unfortunately, Collins’ opportunities faded as she aged. Before her 17th birthday, she said, she was a victim of harassment when Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter at MGM, offered her a significant role if she would sleep with him. She turned him down and reported the incident to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. He threatened to keep her from the movies should she tell. Collins left the industry and never looked back.
She is survived by her daughter Susie McKay Krieser, her son, Harry Nace III, a stepdaughter, Teresa Nace Cabebe, as well as five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
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