Shirley Temple

Shirley Temple emblazoned herself on the American cinema as something both otherworldly and accessible, a tiny angel sent to assuage the ills of mortal adults, as well as an archetype of the adorable, precocious moppet every parent wanted. Appearing in front of the camera at age four, she flashed her signature dimples or pout in more than 40 movies like "Curly Top" (1935) and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" (1937) before she was a teenager. She tapped with legendary dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in four movies, made songs like "On the Good Ship Lollipop" and "Animal Crackers" pop cultural staples and was once credited by President Franklin Roosevelt for helping the United States through the bleak years of the Great Depression. She had mostly bowed out of show business by her adult years, but returned to the public eye under her married name of Shirley Temple Black in the late 1960s as a U.S. diplomat. However it would be her heyday years that would be best remembered, with Temple establishing a Hollywood idiom of the power of earnest innocence over cynicism, as well as making timeless the idea of a largely mythical "simpler America." Shirley Temple died at the age of 85 on February 10, 2014.