Hollywood legend Marilyn Granas, who served as the first stand-in for Shirley Temple in films, has died aged 98. A longtime Beverly Hills resident, Granas died in October, her family announced. Her nephew, film historian Arthur Grant, said she had dementia. Granas appeared in a number of hit Hollywood films including Bright Eyes, Curly Top and The Little Colonel.
In the latter, Granas was stood just a few feet away when Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson performed their famous staircase scene together. Granas did not speak about working with Temple until later in her career, fearing that it would be all she’d be known for. She said: “I made a new life and chose not to be remembered as being Shirley Temple’s stand-in.”
But she did say in an interview when she was in her 40s: “Shirley and I were best friends. We had a wonderful time together. We invented all kinds of games, and of course when the sets weren’t being used, we got to play ‘house’ in all these wonderful places.”
In a 2016 interview with Closer, Granas admitted that she felt sorry for Temple “because her childhood was so unnatural. She didn’t get to go to public school. She didn’t have a lot of friends or get to do kid things, like ride bikes.
“On the set, it was”exclusively the two of us. We never played with other kids.”
Granas went on to work as an assistant casting director at NBC, where she competed in a “Miss Cinderemmy” glamour contest held by the Television Academy on New Year’s Eve in 1955.
During more than three decades in casting, she helped set up William Morris’ casting department and then created her own Beverly Hills-based agency.
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