JANE WITHERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 November 1940, Page 9

JANE WITHERS

A UNIQUE EVENT. SEVEN YEAR OPTION LIFTED. For the first time since Mr Edison projected images on a screen, a child star has lasted as long as the terms of her original screen contract. Jane Withers' seven year contract, like most others in Hollywood, was written to cover a period of seven years with six-monlh options. She was signed by Twentieth Century-Fcx in 1933 and the new option-lift takes her through 1941, when the agreement expires. Of all the child stars who have paraded before the cameras since the industry’s birth, Jane is the first to go the full seven-year route. Il makes her career unique. The whole secret of Jane’s triumph is, of course, her ability to hold on to her public despite changes in her screen personality incidental to the process of growing up. At seven, when she broke into “Bright Eyes.” and stole it away from Shirley Temple—much to the dismay of the Temple menage— Jane was just a pudgy little baby who was downright cute.

Now she is five feet four inches tall, slender, and growing prettier every day. Only in her great vivacity and zestful ways is she the little girl of six years ago. No more can she woo the public with little grimaces. She must act her age, fourteen, because she looks her age. That she does so without qualification is perhaps as good a reason as any for her remarkable achievement. The public little realise how much Jane has changed. She's been averaging four pictures and two personal appearances annually. Fans have seen so much of her they’ve had no chance to mark any definite step towards maturity. This was not true in the case of Shirley Temple, who made but one or two pictures annually and then appeared in roles under her actual age. The smooth development of Jane's career wasn’t so easy as it was accepted. The two persons besides Jane who have had most to do with this Hollywood miracle are her mother, Mrs Ruth Withers, a level-headed woman who looks life squarely in the eye, and Sol M. Wurtzel, a producer whose twenty-five years in that line makes him something of a record-breaker himself. So Jane has kept her characterisa’l tions in harmony with her appearance. In “The Girl From Avenue A" and “Youth Will Be Served,’’ she plays a

girl of sixteen. That’s because she’s tall for her age. In these and other less recent pictures, she’s more than a personality—she’s an actress playing a ; role. Another advantage Jane has enI joyed has been the wide variety of her | roles. In "High School,” she is rich; |in “Youth Will Be Served." she is poor. She is resourceful and clever in 'the “The Girl From Avenue A;” but can’t learn how to sew in “Youth Will Be Served.” In one film she’s a tomboy, in another a sensitive youngster of the most feminine type. Another reason why Jane has whipped the seven-year bugbear; she isn’t loaded down with high-budget pictures. The pressure has never been on her at the box office —as in the case of Shirley Temple, whose two-million-dollar budgets often made the studio's very foundation tremble. If some of Jane’s films haven’t been up to standard, no great effort was made to sell them so the studio could got its money back. They wore played to the family and rural trade, where Jane is tops and nothing she can do is wrong. Her careful rearing and unaffected home life have been responsible in a large measure for Jane’s success. She has luxury plus in her beautiful home on Sunset Boulevard, but she never takes advantage of it. Her best girl chum is the youngster she met and liked when she was a nobody in Hollywood.