Cora Sue Collins: Child star who was forced off the screen by bullying

Sometimes it is death that brings us news of a long-lost youth. An innocence from a time long before our own. After all, who does the name Cora Sue Collins mean anything to today? It is her turn, in what often manages to be the worst news story in the newspaper. But who remembers this child actress who, from the early 1930s onwards, appeared in fifty films in the space of 13 years, acting alongside stars such as Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, before taking a break from acting after being sexually harassed by a scriptwriter? Collins died on 27 April following complications from a stroke. She was 98 years old. She had been swept from the popular imagination, and few will remember the times when the chubby girl, known for her dimples, was part of a constellation of child stars that included Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Collins, who made 11 films in 1934 and 11 more in 1935, suddenly disappeared from the public eye, but he still occasionally looks back on that period with nostalgia. “I must have had a very ordinary face,” he said in a 2014 interview with the online newspaper Film Talk. He added: “As a child, I played all sorts of roles. I guess they could put makeup on me and make me look like any person. But I hope they weren’t paying me for it when I didn’t do anything for it. Movies were incredibly magical to me back then.”

She developed a friendship with Garbo, which began on the set of Queen Christina, where Collins played Garbo as a child in the acclaimed 1933 film about the Swedish monarch. Their bond deepened when she was later cast as his niece in Anna Karenina (1935), and continued through her adult visits to Garbo's homes in New York and Paris.

A 1935 profile of Collins in The Oakland Tribune reported that she had an IQ of 151 and had been voted Hollywood's most popular child actress by her peers. The profile's author, Marion Simms, was staying with the Collinses one morning when actor Pat O'Brien, who had become friends with Cora Sue and whom she called "Uncle Pat," stopped by to take her to school. Collins also starred alongside James Cagney in Picture Snatcher (1933), Bette Davis in All This, and Heaven Too (1940), Colleen Moore in The Scarlet Letter (1934), and Sylvia Sidney in Jennie Gerhardt (1933). However, as is the case with so many child stars, adolescence proved fatal to her, and the roles dwindled. She was already quite despondent when, shortly before her 17th birthday, she was harassed when Harry Ruskin, an MGM screenwriter she saw as a father figure, offered her a big role if she would sleep with him. She refused, burst into tears, and slammed the door of that office and every other in Hollywood.

“I would have given my right arm to have gotten that part,” she told Film Masters, a consortium of film historians and enthusiasts, in 2024. She also said that after that meeting, she reported Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful head of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, to whom she was contractually bound. But his response was: “You’ll get used to it, honey.” Soon after, Mayer lost his temper and threatened to ban her from working in films again.

“Mr. Mayer, that is indeed my wish,” she told him, adding in that interview: “It was the best decision of my life.”

There the dream died, then, little by little, the brilliance and, finally, the memory of the many roles he played.

Cora Sue Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, West Virginia. Her parents separated when she was 3 years old, after her mother discovered that her father had given his secretary a mink coat for Christmas. Cora Sue and her older sister were taken by their mother to Hollywood by train. And it wasn't long before her dream took over. One day, when her mother was enrolling her sister in school, a large car pulled up and a woman jumped out and said, "Excuse me, would you like to put your daughter on the big screen?" Collins recounted this in an interview with the website Cinephiled in 2015. "Of course my mother said, 'Yes!' And the woman said, 'Get in the car with me, there's a big casting call going on at Universal.'"