Jane Withers, child star who for a while rivalled Shirley Temple in the public’s affections – obituary

Jane Withers, who has died aged 95, was marketed as a mischievous tomboy with boundless energy and wild imagination; along with Shirley Temple, Edith Fellows and Sybil Jason, she was one of Hollywood’s most successful female child stars of the 1930s, appearing in nearly 40 films between 1934 and 1943.

“I was everything Shirley Temple wasn’t,” she recalled. “She’d sing, I’d shout! She was pretty with perfect curls, and dainty dresses, I wore my hair in a boyish short bob, scruffy trousers, biffed up boys, climbed trees and dug up worms – I was horrid. Hollywood – and thousands of children – loved me for it.”

Nowhere was the contrast so evident than in Bright Eyes (1934), in which Shirley was a lovable maid’s daughter and Jane the spoilt offspring of her rich but mean-spirited employers. Their on-screen rivalry was lapped up by producers and fans alike, and Jane, playing the brattish Joy Smythe, became a star. “My popularity proved that every kid liked a rebel,” she said.

Jane Withers was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 12 1926; her father Walter taught Bible classes at the local Presbyterian church while her mother Lavinia was a Sunday school teacher. She was already displaying a talent to entertain aged two, mimicking stars of the day such as W C Fields and Charlie Chaplin.

By the time she was four she was performing a solo vaudeville act in Atlanta. She appeared on the radio and had her own programme, billed as “Dixie’s Dainty Dewdrop”.

Her screen debut was in Handle with Care (1932), and several more similarly uncredited appearances followed over the next couple of years. Pushed by her father and accompanied by her mother – whose own acting aspirations had been stymied by her family, and who had even given her daughter a short name so it would fit easily on to a marquee – young Jane did the rounds of the studios.

In 1934, her big break came during a screen test, when the Fox director David Butler noticed her imitation of a machine gun and signed her on the spot for Bright Eyes. She was then given her own picture, Ginger, and began her rise into the Top Ten of box-office attractions.

Fox gave Jane Withers privileges that were denied to most adult actors, including selecting her co-stars and sitting in with the writers on story conferences: “I had to sometimes tell the writers that the dialogue sometimes seemed too grown-up.”

In 1936 Jane’s mother claimed that while on a tour of Boston her daughter had received kidnap threats. The would-be abductors, demanded $50,000 in $5 and $10 notes, saying that Jane would be “taken for a ride”. The New England justice department suggested the whole thing was a hoax, though Fox did step up security for its stars.

By then ranked Hollywood’s sixth highest box-office draw, in 1935 Jane Withers appeared in the 19th-century romance, The Farmer Takes a Wife, featuring Henry Fonda making his Hollywood debut. The following year she starred as a plucky Irish girl who arrives in the US only to find her that her mother has died, in the comedy drama Paddy O’Day.

Over the next few years her work rate did not slacken, and in 1940 Jane Withers wielded her star power, telling the head of 20th Century Fox, Joseph Schenck, that she wanted to make a film with Gene Autry, the “singing cowboy” and soon-to-be war hero. As Autry was with Republic, she arranged for Fox to loan them a bevy of their stars in return for his services.

The result was the 1940 hit western Shooting High, in which they had equal billing, Jane Withers playing a mayor’s daughter who helps to resolve a long-standing feud between her family and Autry’s.

Making a film every few months, by the autumn of 1940 she was receiving thousands of fan letters a week and numerous gifts, including dolls sent in by their hundreds from fans around the world, as well as a teddy bear from President Roosevelt, delivered in person by Eleanor, the First Lady. She also received a letter from the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, thanking her for the pleasure she had afforded them.

After several dozen films, in 1947, Jane Withers, by then in her early twenties, retired after marrying a Texas oil man, William P Moss Jnr. They had three children, but when the marriage failed she embarked upon a comeback, hitting pay dirt in Giant (1956), a critical and box-office hit starring James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.

Jane Withers struck up a firm friendship with Dean, washing daily the pink cowboy shirt that he liked to wear off-set; she had it ready for him on the day of his fatal car crash and kept hold of it as a memento. “I never stopped missing him after all these years,” she wrote in 2019.

The film’s director George Stevens gave her permission to take photos of life on the set, and her work was of such high quality that he kept her around far longer than her small role required.

But by the mid-1960s her film career was over. She turned to the small screen and found fame once again as “Josephine the Plumber”, a character in a long-running and popular series of television ads for Comet cleaning fluid which ran until the mid-1980s.

She became a regular at premieres and film festivals and worked as a voice artist for Disney, as well as appearing on TV shows such as The Love Boat, Hart to Hart and Murder She Wrote. More recently she auctioned off for charity most of the dolls she had received in her glory years.

Following her divorce from William Moss, Jane Withers married Ken Errair, a singer with the Four Freshman, in 1955; they had two children but he died in a plane crash in 1968. She later married Thomas Pierson; he died in 2013. A son, one of the three children from her first marriage, also predeceased her.

Jane Withers, born April 12 1926, died August 7 2021