"It was at the time of silent cinema, it was at the time when Hollywood was born ..." The American actress Diana Serra Carry, known and adulated in the early 1920s, died on Monday February 20 in her home in Gustine ( California), at the age of 101.
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First child prodigy of the seventh art, Diana Serra Carry, quickly adorned with the charming pseudonym of "Baby Peggy" by her countless admirers in the United States, was immediately propelled to the rank of icon in 1921 thanks to the charming duo that she will form at the screen with the Brownie dog, nicknamed the Wonder Dog.
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Born Peggy-Jean Montgomery on October 29, 1918 in San Diego, California, the childlike charm of the future Baby Peggy is spotted, a record of precocity, at 19 months old during a walk with his mother in the Hollywood studios at Sunset Boulevard.
A true cinematographic phenomenon during the silent era, Baby Peggy will be showing more than twenty short films. The Hollywood legend will later tell that she then received more than a million letters from fans who wanted to share their enthusiasm with her.
The same fate as Judy Garland and Shirley Temple
His cinema career was, however, going to fizzle out since in 1925, after a disagreement between Peggy's father and producer Sol Lesser, Baby Peggy's contract was broken. The child star, obviously incapable at the time of defending himself, suffered a terrible return of fortune. The money raised during his four years of glory is simply squandered by his parents.
Diana Serra Cary will have to wait to be an adult to rebuild herself and understand the tragic nature of her first years as a child prodigy. It is in writing that she finds the means of her resilience. Now an essential witness to the beginnings of Hollywood, it is as a historian of silent cinema that she will mark the seventh art.
In her biography, she will compare her childhood crushed by an overly precocious celebrity with that of two other Hollywood prodigies Judy Garland and Shirley Temple. And it is to avoid that, from now on, unscrupulous producers can shamelessly exploit the talent of minor actors that she will fight so that the law finally protects them. More than her films and her fleeting glory, it is ultimately this legal victory that she will have been most proud of.
● A tribute to the career of Baby Peggy, the child prodigy of silent cinema:
● When Diana Serra Carry talked about her career: