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Best remembered as "Perry White" from the 80's SUPERMAN movies...I rememeber him from OUR GANG...RIP JACKIE
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
The New York Times
Jackie Cooper, the pug-nosed kid who became America's Boy in tear-jerker films of the Great Depression, then survived Hollywood's notorious graveyard of child stardom and flourished as an adult in television and modern pictures, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 88.
Before the heydays of Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney, young Jackie, a ragged urchin with a pout and a mischievous half-winked eye, was dreaming up schemes in "Our Gang" comedies and Wallace Beery pictures, like "Treasure Island," that Hollywood churned out. At 9 he became the youngest Oscar nominee for best actor (a record that he still holds), in "Skippy" (1931). Later he dated Lana Turner and Judy Garland, and spent weekends on the yacht of MGM's boss, Louis B. Mayer.
He got into television in the 1950s, starring in the sitcoms "The People's Choice" from 1955 to 1958, in which he played a politician with a basset hound, Cleo, whose droll thoughts were given voice on the soundtrack; and "Hennesey," from 1959 to 1962, playing a Navy doctor.
He later became an Emmy-winning director of "M*A*S*H" and other hits; and he was introduced to a new generation of moviegoers as Perry White, editor of The Daily Planet, in four "Superman" films.
"Of all the kid stars, I think I came through with more of my buttons intact," he wrote in his best-selling memoir, "Please Don't Shoot My Dog" (1981, with Dick Kleiner), titled after a director Norman Taurog got him to cry on camera by having his dog dragged off the set and "shot." Jackie did not win the Academy Award, but he was catapulted to stardom.
Besides "Treasure Island" (1934), in which he played Jim Hawkins to Wallace Beery's crusty Long John Silver, Jackie teamed with Beery in "The Champ" (1931), about a drunken fighter and his son, but facing teenage retirement, he joined the Navy and spent part of World War II in the Pacific.
CLASSIC AMERICANA
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