Shirley Olivia Mills (April 8, 1926 – March 31, 2010) was an American actress. She played the roles of the youngest daughter in ''

The Grapes of Wrath ''The Grapes of Wrath'' is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize ...

'' and the title character in '' Child Bride''. In the latter, she is shown nude in a

nude swimming Nude swimming is the practice of swimming without clothing, whether in natural bodies of water or in swimming pools. A colloquial term for nude swimming is '' skinny-dipping''. In both British and American English, to swim means "to move throu ...

scene, filmed when she was about 12 years old, which became the basis for ''Child Bride'' being classified for many years as an

exploitation film An exploitation film is a film that tries to succeed financially by exploiting current trends, niche genres, or lurid content. Exploitation films are generally low-quality "B movies", though some set trends, attract critical attention, become hi ...

Biography

Born in

Tacoma, Washington Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, Washington, Olympia, and northwest of Mount ...

, Mills started her career as a child dancer, and later appeared in films such as '' Child Bride'' (1938) at the age of 12, ''

'' (1940), and the

Shirley Temple Shirley Temple Black (born Shirley Jane Temple;While Temple occasionally used "Jane" as a middle name, her birth certificate reads "Shirley Temple". Her birth certificate was altered to prolong her babyhood shortly after she signed with Fox in ...

film ''Young People'' (1940). She stopped making films in her early twenties but was later a pioneer in selling data-processing services in the 1960s, becoming the first female president of the

Data Processing Management Association In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpr ...

in Los Angeles and later vice president of marketing and public relations for Management Applied Programming, a major data processing center, for which she started a division for nonprofit organizations. Hanson also launched her own wedding planning company, A Party for All Seasons. Mills married Mel Hanson, a minister, in 1977 who died in 1994; they had no children. Mills died in

Arcadia, California Arcadia is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, located about northeast of downtown Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley and at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. It contains a series of adjacent parks consisting of th ...

, on March 31, 2010, eight days before her 84th birthday, from complications of

pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severity ...

Filmography

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

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Classic Movie Kids
1926 births 2010 deaths 20th-century American actresses American film actresses American child actresses American female dancers American dancers American television actresses Actresses from Tacoma, Washington Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) Deaths from pneumonia in California 21st-century American women {{US-film-actor-1920s-stub