Los Angeles, January 13: Claude Jarman Jr., who received a Juvenile Academy Award for his heart-tugging performance as the boy who adopts an orphaned fawn in the 1946 MGM classic The Yearling, has passed away.
Key Points
1.
Acclaimed child actor who won Juvenile Oscar for 'The Yearling'
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Starred in multiple films across late 1940s
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Authored memoir about Hollywood experiences
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Passed away peacefully at 90 in California home
Jarman was 90 when he breathed his last recently. His wife Katie told The Hollywood Reporter that Claude Jarman Jr. died in his sleep of natural causes at his Marin County home in Kentfield, California.
In films released in 1949, Jarman "starred with Jeanette MacDonald in the Lassie movie The Sun Comes Up, played the brother of a rancher on the run (Robert Sterling) in Roughshod and reteamed with Yearling director Clarence Brown to portray a youngster out to prove the innocence of a Black man in Intruder in the Dust, based on the William Faulkner novel and filmed in Oxford, Mississippi."
At the 1947 Oscars, Jarman was presented with his Juvenile Academy Award from Shirley Temple at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. He was the seventh youngster to get the miniature trophy, 12 years after Temple was the first. (Years later, the Academy gifted him with a regular-size Oscar, and he proudly displayed both in his home.)
Jarman also produced a 1972 documentary about music promoter Bill Graham and the Fillmore Auditorium and acted one last time in the 1978-79 NBC miniseries Centennial.
His book, My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood, was published in 2018.
He is survived by his wife, his children, Claude III, Murray, Elizabeth, Vanessa, Natalie, Sarah and Charlotte, and eight grandchildren.
