Posted on 02/10/2016 5:04:55 PM PST by Morgana
Tommy Kelly, who played the titular boy hero in the 1938 movie "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," has died. He was 90.
Kelly suffered congestive heart failure on Jan. 25 in Greensboro, N.C., his son announced Tuesday.
Along with the adaptation of the Mark Twain novel for which he's best known, Kelly appeared in "Gone With the Wind," "He Walked By Night," and "The West Point Story" before retiring from Hollywood at age 25.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
wow. RIP dude.
RIP
Great movies.
Those were the days. Great movies.
I grew up watching him, and had fond memories of his movies during the 1940’s. What a fun actor and person.
“He Walked By Night” (1948) is an old favorite. Great crime thriller.
Kelly was in the Bronx, the son of Nora and Michael Kelly, a fireman, in humble circumstances.[1] He had twelve siblings.[2] Kelly’s grandparents, all four, were from Ireland.[2]
He began his acting career at the age of twelve when he was selected to play the role of Tom Sawyer in the 1938 movie The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an adaption of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.[1] Approximately 25000 boys had auditioned for that role and it is said that famous producer David O. Selznick handpicked Kelly for the role.[3] Despite Kelly reaching good critics for his performance, the film was only a poor financial success. He also played the lead role in Peck’s Bad Boy with the Circus later that year as Bill Peck.[4]
In 1939, Tommy Kelly had a small but memorable part in Gone with the Wind, as the crying boy in a band in Atlanta, while the death lists are given out. He played a notable supporting role as Willie in Archie Mayo’s musical film They Shall Have Music (1939), followed by a leading role as a young cadet in the B movie Military Academy (1940). As he reached adulthood, Kelly’s roles in movies were minor and he was often uncredited.[5] He appeared in The Magnificent Yankee[6] in 1950, which turned out to be his last of 19 films before ending his acting career.[5]
As with many other stars, the war years found Tommy in the U.S. Army,[7] where he served in the infantry, not the USO as did some other child stars; he fought in the European theater, participating in the critical campaign for the bridge at Remagen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Kelly_%28actor%29#Early_life_and_career
Thanks. I was about to look for it there or elsewhere. To be honest, I’m not sure if I ever saw it before. If I did I must have been very young.
Yes, it’s a public-domain item, and is found all over on the internet and on cheapie dvd releases. Luckily, MGM/UA officially released a pristine, restored copy on dvd (which I grabbed almost immediately), but I believe it’s now long out of print.
Oh, I thought you meant the Tom Sawyer film.
But that one looks good too. I’ll definitely check it out.
After his Hollywood days, Tommy Kelly earned a Ph.D. from the Michigan State.[7] He worked as a high school teacher and counselor in Culver City and later as an administrator in the Orange County school system. He worked in Liberia as an administrator for the Peace Corps towards the end of the 1960s.[3] He afterwards served as superintendent of international schools in Liberia and Venezuela.[8] He eventually returned to the United States and worked in an important position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.[9] Ever conscious of the value of education his thesis focused, among other things, on the relative advantages of children who were educated in U.S. military dependent schools abroad, “Dr. Kelly” served as an International Relations Advisor, in the International Organization Affairs (IOA) unit of the Office of International Cooperation and Development (OICD) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture,[7] where he prepared positions for the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, with personal responsibility for OECD, and United States delegations to the governing boards of United Nations Organizations concerned with Food and Agriculture, a position he held until his retirement from Federal Service. He also held another teaching job in Washington D.C. in the 1980s.
So acting was only the beginning. Unlike many child stars, he went on to a useful and successful career.
That is there too. Obviously it has been Colorized.
The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer 1939
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy_pcmFNIH8
Thanks, but it seems to be the same exact video I linked to above, although it was uploaded by two different people. They have the same foreign subtitles.
Good actor, great, brave American. Hollywood doesn’t make them like that anymore, and we are worse off for it.
The only child actors who succeeded are Shirley Temple, Tommy Kelly, Kirk Cameron, and a few others...a lot of others died to early...
Freddie Bartholomew did good.
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