HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – September 10, 2015 (Gephardt Daily) — The New York Times is reporting Dick Moore, a public relations executive who was known as ‘Dickie’ when he was a Hollywood child star, playing the movies’ first talking Oliver Twist and later giving Shirley Temple her first on-screen kiss, died on Monday in Connecticut. He was 89.
Moore was not yet a year old and evidently cute as a button when he made his movie debut in the 1927 silent feature “The Beloved Rogue,” which starred John Barrymore as the 15th-century French poet and gadabout François Villon. Young Dickie, uncredited, played Villon as an infant.
He very quickly became a busy youngster, appearing in dozens of features and short films, many before he turned 12, including “Blonde Venus” (1932), in which he played Marlene Dietrich’s son, and “The Story of Louis Pasteur” (1936), in which he played a boy saved from rabies by Paul Muni.
In 1932-33, he appeared regularly in guest roles in the “Our Gang” shorts (the series was known as “The Little Rascals” when the films were shown on television).
He was six when he played the title role in Hollywood’s first sound adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” (1933).
Moore claimed that the much-ballyhooed kiss he gave Shirley Temple in 1942’s “Miss Annie Rooney” when he was 16 and she was 14 was his first kiss on-screen or off (though Temple, as she admitted in her autobiography, couldn’t say the same).
Moore was later the public relations director for Actors’ Equity Association, the stage actors union, as well as editor of its magazine, before starting his own public relations firm in 1966.
