Jane Withers: Impish child star of Depression-era Hollywood

Thanks to her energetic demeanour and dimpled charm, the young actor took America by storm

On the set of ‘Wild and Woolly’ in 1937 (Snap/Shutterstock)

Jane Withers, a child star of the 1930s and 1940s who specialised in impish roles – an antidote to the cloying sweetness of Shirley Temple – and who later became a TV fixture as Josephine the Plumber in advertisements for Comet scouring powder, has died aged 95.

Driven by her mother, a thwarted actress, Withers debuted on the vaudeville stage at two and by four had her own radio show in Atlanta billed as Dixie’s Dainty Dewdrop. She specialised in impressions of newsmakers and noted actors, from Greta Garbo to Maurice Chevalier.

“I’d gone as far as I could at six and a half,” she once told a Turner Classic Movies interviewer, “and it was time to go to Hollywood.”

Her mother, she said, was convinced the dimpled child would be a sensation. Two years later, Withers had her breakthrough as Temple’s bratty, apple-cheeked nemesis in Bright Eyes (1934): a spoiled rich girl who tries to mow down Temple with a tricycle, demands a machine gun as a present and rips the arms off dolls.

“I was the meanest, creepiest kid you ever saw,” Withers later said with pride.

In contrast to Temple, the sunshine-spirited embodiment of Depression-era hope, Withers was plain-faced and chubby, with a siren of a voice that may have inhibited her more immediate stardom. She and another young actress, she once told the Los Angeles Times, “used to call ourselves ‘the two uglies’. Well, we would say, ‘It’s them’ [the pretty ones] or us, and most of the time it was ‘them’.”

Working at Fox Films and the successor company 20th Century-Fox, she became a top-billed star in Ginger (1935), Paddy O’Day (1936) and Little Miss Nobody (1936), playing street-tough moppets or scrappy foundlings who are more likely to pop a fancy-pants boy in the eye than burst into song and dance like Temple.

She became one of the era’s biggest young stars – a rung or two below Temple, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in commercial appeal but popular enough to draw co-stars such as the Ritz Brothers comedy team in Pack Up Your Troubles (1939) and the singing cowboy Gene Autry in Shooting High (1940).

Her impression in a newsreel of Franklin D Roosevelt turned the president into an admirer. “He was a big fan of mine,” she later told the Los Angeles Times. “He would call me and leave a message because I was always busy.”

Child actors Bobby Breen and Withers in 1939 (Getty)

Withers lent her name to a doll line and the fictional “Jane Withers” adventure series inspired by the Nancy Drew mystery books. She made more than two dozen movies as a child star and had five secretaries to handle her fan mail.

But her main studio dropped her when her box-office receipts began to wane as she entered adolescence, and she freelanced for several years. Her most important film was The North Star (1943), a pro-Soviet wartime melodrama in which she joined Walter Huston, Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter as Ukrainian villagers fighting fascist invaders. The movie was notable for Samuel Goldwyn’s top-line production values, which attracted Lewis Milestone as director, Lillian Hellman as writer and Aaron Copland as score composer.

Onstage the next year, Withers debuted the Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn torch song “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry” in the musical comedy Glad to See You. In a show that otherwise flopped on the road to Broadway, she won plaudits from Boston Globe arts critic Cyrus Durgin for her “oblique sauciness and the poise of a veteran”.

Largely in bit and voice-over parts as an adult, Withers won a meaty TV role in 1963 as the nagging wife who drives mild-mannered Bob Newhart to dream up a murder plot in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. She was a pitchwoman for Comet throughout the 1960s and 70s, prompting the TV Guide headline, “Her Career Has Gone Down the Drain – and Jane Withers is Delighted”.

Withers at a Hollywood premiere in 2008 (Getty)

With her pleasant but intense salesmanship, she was a model for the later character of Progressive insurance’s Flo, whom Advertising Age once described as “a weirdly sincere, postmodern Josephine the Plumber who just really wants to help”.

Jane Ruth Withers was born in Atlanta on 12 April 1926, to a mother single-mindedly obsessed with her daughter’s show-business fortunes. “She even gave me a short first name because she thought it would look good on a marquee,” Withers told the Los Angeles Times.

After her success on Atlanta radio, she went to Hollywood with her mother and struggled initially to gain the attention of studio casting directors.

“I remember the first time I saw Shirley Temple,” Withers recalled to the Copley News Service. “I was seven years old – no, six – and had been brought to Fox to sign for a picture. While we waited, this beautiful little girl with golden curls passed by, the cutest thing I ever saw in my life, and I said, ‘Mamma, don’t be disappointed, but I think I just lost that part.’ And sure enough, I wasn’t signed.”

She had uncredited parts in mob scenes and films including WC Fields’ It’s a Gift (1934) before playing Temple’s on-screen archrival later that year, cast in Bright Eyes based on her ability to mimic the sound of a machine gun.

In a rare leading adult role, she brought a light comic touch to the low-budget crime drama Danger Street (1947). But the film also marked the start of a nine-year screen absence after her marriage to a producer and wealthy Texas oilman, William P Moss Jr, with whom she had three children.

After the marriage crumbled – she testified in divorce proceedings that he “drank and gambled excessively” – she returned to acting with an appearance in Giant (1956), a Texas-set epic drama in which she was the homely, straight-talking early love interest of Rock Hudson’s rancher who then befriends and toughens up his refined screen wife, Elizabeth Taylor.

A year earlier, Withers had married singer Kenneth Errair of the harmony group the Four Freshmen. They had two children before he died in a plane crash in 1968. She later married Thomas Pierson, variously identified as an astrologer and a travel agency executive. He died in 2013.

Her son, Walter “Randy” Moss died in 1986. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

In addition to her film career, Withers was involved in charitable work and animal rescue and taught Sunday school at Presbyterian churches.

She amassed a trove of movie memorabilia, including an autographed pair of Fred Astaire’s dancing shoes and Mary Pickford’s dining table. She nurtured the hope those items would serve as the centrepiece of an arts-education centre for children.

“I tried to save things important for the world to see and share,” she told the St Petersburg Times in 1988. She also collected thousands of dolls and teddy bears and remarked to an interviewer, “I guess I’ve never grown up.”

Jane Withers, actor and radio show host, born 12 April 1926, died 7 August 2021

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