Shirley Temple Black (1928-2014): Child Star, Diplomat

English: Shirley Temple Black in Prague in 1990, Czechoslovakia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At six years old, Shirley Temple sang and danced her way into the hearts of Depression-era Americans in the movies.

As an adult, Shirley Temple Black reinvented herself as a diplomat who served under Republican administrations.

Today's child stars could have taken lessons from Temple on how to survive life after stardom--and how to make a lasting name for themselves.

Temple was the top Hollywood box office draw in the mid-1930s, hoofing and pouting her way through such films as "Bright Eyes", "Curly Top", "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" and "Captain January".  She outdrew such future film legends as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Gary Cooper, and almost singlehandedly saved the 20th Century Fox studio from bankruptcy.

Then a terrible thing happened.  Shirley Temple grew up.  After a few adult roles in films such as "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer", she retired at the ripe old age of 22.  It's tough to make a living as an actor when America only remembers you as a little girl.

So Temple moved into a political and diplomatic career.  She ran for Congress as a Republican in 1967.  She served under President Richard Nixon as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.  She would later become the American ambassador to Ghana under Gerald Ford, and to what was Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain came down under George H.W. Bush.

Meanwhile, generations of Hollywood child stars would come and go, perhaps inspired by watching Temple sing and dance whenever one of her old movies shows up on TV.  Some made the transition to adult acting careers, others lived tabloid-worthy lives of drugs, drink and bizarre behavior.  Some of them even died young.

Shirley Temple Black died Monday at age 85.  She was not the first child star Hollywood had ever produced--just the best known.  And she still will be long after sailing off on the Good Ship Lollipop.