Shirley Temple

Shirley Jane Temple (April 23, 1928 – February 10, 2014), later known as Shirley Temple Black, was a child actress who appeared in over 40 films from 1932; the majority being released before she reached adolescence. She became a diplomat and United States ambassador as an adult.

Shirley Temple in 1990

Quotes

• I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
  • Quoted in The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations by Robert Andrews

• Sunnybrook Farm is now a parking lot; the petticoats are in the garbage can, where they belong in the modern world; and I detest censorship.
  • Quoted in Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women by Bill Adler, p. 94

• I think we all learn from the past. I just feel we shouldn't live there. We shouldn't live in the past. I live for today, and to me, the most important moment is now.
  • Quoted in: "Madam Ambassador - Sixty Minutes" CBS, 1975.

• Some of you may recollect a little girl with clean and curled hair, starched skirts, ruffles, and bows. That perception was wrong. The reality was a kid in blue jeans and sentimental sneakers, dirty hands, dirty face, usually climbing a tree.
  • Quoted in: Shirley Temple Black, Movie Star, U.S. Ambassador - Landon Lecture" Kansas State University, April 10, 1979.

• I never even aspired to be an actress. Even when I was very young, I had three aspirations: to be a surgeon, or an FBI agent, or a pie salesman.
  • Quoted in: Shirley Temple Black, Movie Star, U.S. Ambassador - Landon Lecture" Kansas State University, April 10, 1979.

• President Roosevelt patted and squeezed me in 1938. Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon shook my hand, but then I was older. Ford kissed me. Jimmy Carter kissed me in the White House, which means I was even older. And now I am simply female, black, and unemployed.
  • Quoted in: Shirley Temple Black, Movie Star, U.S. Ambassador - Landon Lecture" Kansas State University, April 10, 1979.

• I have no trouble being taken seriously as a woman and a diplomat here. My only problems have been with Americans who, in the beginning, refused to believe I had grown up since my movies.
  • Quoted in: Johnson, Eric M. "Shirley Temple Black, child star who became diplomat, dies at 85" Reuters, February 2014.

• Politicians are actors too, don't you think?
  • Quoted in: "Hollywood star Shirley Temple dies" BBC News, 11 February 2014.

• Macho attitudes usually fall victim to hard work, timely humor, and an absence of resentment.
  • Quoted in: Kalb, Claudia. "Shirley Temple Black’s Remarkable Second Act as a Diplomat." Smithsonian Magazine, June 2022.

Disputed

• Fuck off.
  • Alleged response to being offered a guest star role on The Simpsons. Quoted in: Sorensen, Jeff. "Shirley Temple Was Once Offered A Role On ‘The Simpsons’ But Told Them To F*ck Off" Uproxx, 11 February, 2014.
  • Executive producer Mike Scully stated in the DVD commentary for "Last Tap Dance in Springfield" that Temple was unable to record for her offered role.

Quotes about Shirley Temple

• When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt (1935), quoted in "Happy Birthday, Shirley Temple" The Guardian, 23 April 2008.

• Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter. There were paper-doll books of her and of the Dionne Quintuplets-five identical girls born to a French-Canadian family and of the famous dollhouse of the actress Colleen Moore, which contained every luxury conceivable in perfect miniature, including a tiny phonograph that played Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting. I must have seen her dancing with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in The Littlest Rebel, but I remember her less as a movie star than as a presence, like President Roosevelt, or Lindbergh, whose baby had been stolen; but she was a little girl whose face was everywhere on glass mugs and in coloring books as well as in the papers.
  • Adrienne Rich What is Found There (1993)

• Watching clips of her, it's so amazing that she was such a part of our film history from the very beginning. I'm sure it wasn't easy being a child star, although she went on to become an ambassador, so she re-invented herself along the way. But it's a great loss. I wish all the best for her family and thank her for her contribution.
  • George Clooney, quoted in: "Hollywood star Shirley Temple dies" BBC News, 11 February 2014.