A former child star who was one of only 12 recipients of a Juvenile Academy Award has died. Claude Jarman Jr., best known for his role in the 1946 classic The Yearling and who also starred opposite John Wayne in Rio Grande, passed away in his sleep at his home in Kentfield, California on Sunday, his wife of 38 years, Katie, told The Hollywood Reporter. Katie said Jarman died of natural causes. He was 90.
Born on Sept. 27, 1934, Jarman got his start in 1945 when director Clarence Brown visited his fifth-grade classroom on Valentine’s Day while scouting for The Yearling. Speaking to the Film Noir Foundation in 2016, Jarman recalled, “Next thing, they called three days later and said, “Get ready to leave for Hollywood in a week.”
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A then 10-year-old Jarman left Nashville for Florida and spent roughly two years filming the 1946 MGM production, an adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1939 book. Jarman took on the role of Jody Baxter, a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, and once walked down Fifth Avenue with a deer on a leash to promote the film.
In 1947, he received the Juvenile Academy Award for his role in the film, making him one of just 12 actors to win the award and the seventh overall. Shirley Temple, who was the first winner of a juvenile Oscar in 1934, presented him the award at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Jarman later received a regular-size Oscar from the Academy.
In the years that followed, Jarman continued his Hollywood career while also attending school on the MGM lot with classmates including Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Powell, Margaret O’Brien, Natalie Wood, and Dean Stockwell. He went on to appear in 10 more films – the 1949 Lassie film The Sun Comes Up, Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949), the John Wayne western Rio Grande (1950), Hangman’s Knot (1952), and Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), and among others.
“I had nothing to compare it to. I thought, ‘Doesn’t everyone have this?’ I had my own dressing room, my own makeup person and wardrobe person,” Jarman told the Marina Times in 2014 when reflecting on his early success.
Jarman eventually left Hollywood and returned to Nashville, where he finished high school and went on to graduate from Vanderbilt University in 1956. He later returned to Los Angeles as an Armed Forces publicist, working with studios to make movies about the Navy, before relocating to San Francisco in 1963. He occasionally dabbled in the entertainment world, producing a 1972 documentary about music promoter Bill Graham and the Fillmore Auditorium, acting in the 1978-79 NBC miniseries Centennial, and releasing his book, My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood, in 2018.
Prior to his passing, Jarman was the last surviving person from a 1949 photograph taken to commemorate the 25th anniversary of MGM, the actor having appeared alongside Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Errol Flynn, Angela Lansbury, and Lassie. He is survived by his wife Katie, as well as his children, Claude III, Murray, Elizabeth, Vanessa, Natalie, Sarah and Charlotte, and eight grandchildren.
