Marilyn Granas, who served as the first stand-in for Shirley Temple in films including Bright Eyes, Curly Top and The Little Colonel, has died. She was 98.
A longtime Beverly Hills resident, Granas died Oct. 21, her family announced. Her nephew, film historian Arthur Grant, said she had dementia.
After Temple had joined Granas and her classmates to work on a number in a dance studio, Granas was asked to stand back-to-back with the child star. “We were exactly the same size, and they hired me as her stand-in,” she recalled.
The next day, Granas reported for work on Temple’s Baby, Take a Bow (1934) — they were 6 when it reached theaters — followed by such other films as Bright Eyes (1934), Now and Forever (1934), Curly Top (1935) and The Little Colonel (1935).
On that last one, Granas was just a few feet away when Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson performed their famed staircase scene together.
“Shirley and I were best friends,” she noted. “We had a wonderful time together. We invented all kinds of games, and of course when the sets weren’t being used, we got to play ‘house’ in all these wonderful places.”
Born in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 1927, Marilyn Rowena Granas had appeared alongside Temple in the 1933 short films Glad Rags to Riches, Kid in Hollywood and The Kid’s Last Fight before getting the stand-in gig.
In a 2016 interview with Closer, Granas said she felt sorry for Temple “because her childhood was so unnatural. She didn’t get to go to public school. She didn’t have a lot of friends or get to do kid things, like ride bikes. On the set, it was exclusively the two of us. We never played with other kids.”
According to Grant, Granas “kept her Jewish heritage a secret over worries that Shirley’s mother Gertrude’s perceived prejudice might negatively impact both Marilyn’s professional and personal relationship with Shirley,” he wrote in a recent post on CinemaCafe.com.
In 2020, Granas recalled being on the playground at Wilton Place Elementary when an older girl got off her bicycle, hit her in the face and said, “You’re a nasty little brat and I hate you. I thought, ‘What is her problem?’ and I thought, ‘You know, this celebrity thing has got two sides to it and maybe it’s not so much fun.’”
Granas traveled the world with her mother and was in art class at Beverly Hills High School when she met Kenneth Anger. She then starred for the director in his first publicly seen film, the 35-minute Escape Episode, made in 1944 but not released until a few years later.
Granas graduated from UCLA in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in Speech and English, worked in a mailroom at CBS and became a secretary and then an assistant casting director at NBC, where she competed in a “Miss Cinderemmy” glamour contest held by the Television Academy on New Year’s Eve in 1955.
Over more than three decades in casting, she helped set up William Morris’ casting department, had her own Beverly Hills-based agency — in the 1970s, she brought in actors for the bilingual kids series Villa Alegre over — and was an agent as well.
Granas avoided talking about working with Temple until she was in her 40s. “I made a new life and chose not to be remembered as being Shirley Temple’s stand-in,” she said.
Survivors also include her niece, Laurie.