Beloved Actress Passed Away At Age Of 98


Cora Sue Collins, the charming child actress of the 1930s and ’40s who worked alongside such legends as Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne and Merle Oberon during her brief but sensational career, has died. She was 98.

Collins died Sunday at her home in Beverly Hills of complications from a stroke, her daughter, Susie Krieser, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Collins played younger versions of Colbert in Torch Singer (1933), Frances Dee in The Strange Case of Clara Deane (1932) and Keep ‘Em Rolling (1934), Loretta Young in Caravan (1934), Oberon in The Dark Angel (1935) and Lynn Bari in Blood and Sand (1941).

“I must have the most common face in the world,” she said in a 2019 interview. “I played either the most famous actresses of the ’30s as a child or their child. They made me up to look like everybody.”

The MGM contract player also was William Powell and Myrna Loy’s daughter in Evelyn Prentice (1934); portrayed Amy Lawrence in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938); appeared in the original Magnificent Obsession (1935), starring Dunne and her personal crush, Robert Taylor; and was one of Davis’ students at an American girls school in All This, and Heaven Too (1940).

Garbo personally selected Collins to play her younger self in Queen Christina (1933), and the two appeared together again in Anna Karenina (1935). The reclusive star often invited Collins into her lavish suite on the MGM lot for afternoon tea — Collins drank milk — and they remained friends until Garbo’s death in 1990.