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2025-01-13 13:58:11 UTC
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PermalinkClaude Jarman Jr., Young Star of ‘The Yearling,’ Dies at 90
His brief time in the Hollywood limelight included a Juvenile Academy
Award and appearances in 'Rio Grande,' 'Intruder in the Dust' and
'Roughshod.'
By Mike Barnes
January 12, 2025 5:47pm
Claude Jarman Jr., who received a Juvenile Academy Award for his
heart-tugging performance as the boy who adopts an orphaned fawn in the
1946 MGM classic The Yearling, died Sunday. He was 90.
Jarman died in his sleep of natural causes at his Marin County home in
Kentfield, California, his wife of 38 years, Katie, told THR‘s Scott
Feinberg.
In films released in 1949, Jarman starred with Jeanette MacDonald in the
Lassie movie The Sun Comes Up, played the brother of a rancher on the
run (Robert Sterling) in Roughshod and reteamed with Yearling director
Clarence Brown to portray a youngster out to prove the innocence of a
Black man in Intruder in the Dust, based on the William Faulkner novel
and filmed in Oxford, Mississippi.
A year later, he played the son of a cavalry officer (John Wayne) in
John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950).
Born on Sept. 27, 1934, Jarman was the 10-year-old son of a Nashville
railroad accountant when Brown came to his fifth-grade classroom on
Valentine’s Day 1945 while randomly visiting schools in the South to
scout kids for The Yearling.
“Next thing, they called three days later and said, ‘Get ready to leave
for Hollywood in a week,'” Jarman recalled in a 2016 interview with Alan
K. Rode for the Film Noir Foundation.
He was soon hired to play Jody Baxter, the lonely son of Gregory Peck
and Jane Wyman’s characters, in The Yearling, adapted from the 1939 book
by Pulitzer Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
He said it took about two years in Florida to finish the movie; one shot
with a deer needed 115 takes to get on film. And to promote the feature,
he once walked with a deer on a leash down Fifth Avenue in New York.
At the 1947 Oscars, Jarman was presented with his Juvenile Academy Award
from Shirley Temple at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. He was the
seventh youngster to get the miniature trophy, 12 years after Temple was
the first. (Years later, the Academy gifted him with a regular-size
Oscar, and he proudly displayed both in his home.)
Asked what he thought of his success in those early days during a 2014
interview with the Marina Times, Jarman replied, “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.”
He attended school on the MGM lot, where his classmates included
Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Powell, Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell. And
while he was making Roughshod at RKO, he and Natalie Wood studied
together.
Back at MGM, he appeared in flashbacks as the younger version of Van
Johnson’s character, a pilot lost at sea, in High Barbaree (1947).
In April 1949, he appeared with more than four dozen MGM stars,
including Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Angela Lansbury,
Errol Flynn, Esther Williams, Judy Garland and Lassie in a photo to
commemorate the 25th anniversary of the studio. He was the last
surviving person from that iconic shot.
Jarman returned to Nashville in 1950 to finish high school but appeared
in Hangman’s Knot (1952), starring Randolph Scott, Donna Reed and Lee
Marvin and directed by Roy Huggins. He graduated from Vanderbilt
University in 1956, the same year he was seen in the Fess
Parker-starring The Great Locomotive Chase.
He came back to L.A. as an Armed Forces publicist, working with studios
to make movies about the Navy, then moved to San Francisco in 1963 as an
employee for the John Hancock Insurance Co.
From 1965-80, Jarman headed the San Francisco International Film
Festival. He received the fest’s George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award
in 2019 for “elegantly leveraging his success as a young actor to
promote the art of film, bringing together the industry and Bay Area
community in ways that reverberate to this day.”
Jarman also produced a 1972 documentary about music promoter Bill Graham
and the Fillmore Auditorium and acted one last time in the 1978-79 NBC
miniseries Centennial.
His book, My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood, was published in
2018.
In addition to his wife (his third), survivors include his children,
Claude III, Murray, Elizabeth, Vanessa, Natalie, Sarah and Charlotte,
and eight grandchildren. He will be buried in Nashville, and a
celebration of his life, to take place in San Francisco, is being
planned.
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