Everyone by now is familiar with stories of how child actors were mistreated, used up, and then discarded and forgotten by Hollywood over the years. It seems as though the number of young men and women who managed to survive the experience without lasting emotional trauma, financial hardship, or worse is far outweighed by those who didn’t. One former juvenile star who placed himself in the former category was Claude Jarman, Jr., Oscar-winning adolescent star of M-G-M’s 1946 drama The Yearling, who passed away earlier this week in the Bay Area California community of Kentfield at 90.
Born in Nashville in 1934, Jarman began acting in local children’s theatre productions and was chosen during a nationwide talent search by M-G-M for their adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel. As young Jody Baxter, who lives on a remote 1870s northern Florida farm with parents “Penny” (Gregory Peck) and Ora (Jane Wyman), Jarman finds and cares for an orphaned fawn which is dubbed Flag. The pair’s loving bond is put to an emotional test as Flag gets older and becomes a threat to the family’s crops. For his premier film appearance, Jarman became the seventh of 12 recipients of the now-defunct Academy Juvenile Award for child performers.
After the success of The Yearling, the Jarman family moved from Tennessee to Southern California, and teenage Claude studied at Metro’s two-room schoolhouse alongside Margaret O’Brien, Dean Stockwell, Elizabeth Taylor, and other talented youngsters. His next role was in 1947’s High Barbaree, as the boyhood personage of a troubled Navy pilot (Van Johnson). In 1948 Jarman played a young man in a Mississippi town who helps a black man (Juano Hernandez) clear his name of murder in the landmark drama Intruder in the Dust, based on a William Faulkner novel. “It was dealing with a subject ahead of its time,” Jarman said of the picture years later. “We all kind of knew it was an important film.” That same year he also appeared in the RKO western Roughshod, then was featured opposite Lassie and (in her final film) Jeanette MacDonald in the melodrama The Sun Comes Up.
Jarman co-starred with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in the final film of John Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy,” 1950’s Rio Grande, playing a West Point dropout who joins the Army as a private and winds up under the command of his estranged father, a battle-weary Cavalry office (Wayne). Claude stayed on the frontier for the M-G-M sagebrushers The Outriders (also 1950) and Inside Straight (1951), as well as Hangman’s Knot in 1952 for Columbia. By now, though, Jarman was 18 and had aged out of the roles that made him a success. After a supporting turn in the South Seas adventure Fair Wind to Java in 1954, his final big-screen performance came alongside Davy Crockett himself, Fess Parker, in Walt Disney’s Civil War thriller The Great Locomotive Chase in 1956.
Jarman left Hollywood and returned to his home state to attend Vanderbilt University in the late ’50s, and then served for three years in the U.S. Navy. Once his hitch was up Claude moved to San Francisco and became an active member of the San Francisco Film Society, helping launch the city’s eponymous film festival and turning it into one of the country’s leading cinematic events (his old Tinseltown connections no doubt serving him well, as many top stars and directors made the trip upstate to attend). He even returned to acting–briefly–when he joined the cast of the TV miniseries Centennial in the late ’70s. In 2018 Jarman authored a book recounting his days before the cameras, “My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood.” Married three times, Jarman left behind a family that included seven children and eight grandchildren.
In 1949, over 50 of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s top players–Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy among them–assembled for a one-of-a-kind group photo commemorating the studio’s 25th anniversary. We can’t show it here for copyright reasons, but if you look at the third row on the left you’ll see a neatly-dressed Claude Jarman, Jr. sandwiched between John Hodiak and Van Johnson. Jarman was the last surviving person in the star-studded picture.