Billy Watson, child actor dating back to the silent era who appeared with his brothers in Mr Smith Goes to Washington – obituary

Billy Watson, who has died aged 98, was a Hollywood child star who began his career in the silent era; he featured in more than 20 films, including Show Boat and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

The Watsons were known as the “first family of Hollywood”, appearing in more than a thousand movies between them. “Life on the set of a silent film was one of noise, laughter and horseplay,” Billy recalled. “The arrival of sound changed all that. There were signs everywhere telling us actors to be quiet. For that reason we Watsons didn’t like it when talkies arrived in Hollywood.”

William Richard Watson was born in Los Angeles on Christmas Day 1923, the sixth of nine children (six boys and three girls).

His grandfather James Watson had photographed Buffalo Bill riding up Broadway in 1904, while his father, James Caughey Watson Sr, was a horse breaker turned stuntman, film extra and second unit director; he famously created the piano-wire effects for Douglas Fairbanks Sr’s flying carpet sequence in The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

Billy’s mother Golda took in washing for the Actor’s Costume Corporation.

His eldest brother, Coy Watson Jr, “the Keystone Kid” (he often worked at the Mack Sennett Studio, home to the Keystone Cops), was already an established child star, having made his screen debut in 1913.

It was said that when a director went to Watson’s father and asked: “I need a child for a movie,” he would simply reply: “What size and what sex?”

Billy was barely five when he appeared alongside several of his siblings in Chester Conklin’s 1928 comedy Taxi 13 and, the same year, the silent Western Taking a Chance.

He made his “talkie” debut in a short, Who’s the Boss (1930), and through the decade took a mixture of roles, usually uncredited, criss-crossing Hollywood from studio to studio, often with his brothers and sisters in tow. “There’d not be a day when one of the Watsons wasn’t called upon by a movie star or studio,” he recalled.

By 1939 his career as a child star was winding down, though he made four films that year, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, starring Mickey Rooney, and – alongside his brothers Harry, Garry and Delmar – the considerably better Mr Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra and starring James Stewart.

Watson made his last film, I Take This Woman, with Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr, in 1940, though his scenes were cut. Like three of his brothers he enrolled in the US Coast Guard during the Second World War.

Postwar he became a commercial photographer, and in 1958 he made a television appearance on a This is Your Life tribute to his parents. In 1979 there was a brief return – on the small screen – in the 1979 Canadian series about a Lassie-style German Shepherd, The Littlest Hobo.

In 1999 the surviving Watson siblings accepted the award of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – the only family to be accorded the honour.

Billy Watson married, in 1946, Sue; she died in 2008, and he is survived by their three children, and by one of his actor siblings, Garry, 93.

Billy Watson, born December 25 1923, died February 17 2022