Shirley Temple Black was an American film actress and singer. She began her career at age three starring in films as a child performer. In 1938, she became the youngest person to receive an Academy Award for best actress for her performance in Babes in Arms. At age fourteen, she starred in another Disney film, Bright Eyes
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She continued her career with a series of hit films throughout the 1940s and 1950s, including National Velvet (1944), Curly Top (1947), and Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1948). She continued acting into adulthood and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1975, she published her autobiography Child Star.
Her father, George Black, was a Scottish immigrant who worked as a coal miner and then as a laborer for Southern Pacific Railroad. Her mother, Gertrude Amelia "Trudy" Temple, was from Tennessee; the family moved to California when Shirley Temple was two years old.