Former Child Actress Dies of Stroke: Cora Sue Collins Was 98

Former child actress Cora Sue Collins has died. She was 98.

She passed away in her Beverly Hills home after complications derived from a stroke, her daughter Susie Krieser told The Hollywood Reporter.

Collins was a child actress during the Golden Age of Hollywood, although she never made the jump to acting as an adult because she retired from show business at 18 years old.

In the 30s and 40s, she worked alongside plenty of film legends like Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Irene Dunne, Merle Oberon, and Claudette Colbert.

For example, she played younger versions of Colbert in 1933’s Torch Singer and Oberon in 1935’s The Dark Angel. Many of her roles involved playing a younger version of a Hollywood starlet.

“I must have the most common face in the world,” she said in a 2019 interview at the Los Angeles Public Library. “I played either the most famous actresses of the ’30s as a child or their child. They made me up to look like everybody.”

Famously, Greta Garbo hand-picked Collins to play herself in 1933’s Queen Christina, and they worked together again in Anna Karenina. Despite the wide age gap between the two actresses and Garbo’s famously reclusive nature, they became lifelong friends, and both regularly spent time together until Garbo died in 1990.

Collins appeared in over four dozen movies in her 13 years of acting before calling it quits.

She is survived by her two children, her four grandchildren, and her five great-grandchildren.