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In Heidi, Shirley Temple was nine years old, but the world (along with Shirley) thought she was eight years old--according to Twentieth Century Fox publicity. To make her seem even more precocious, the studio had actually re-crafted her birth certificate to say April 23, 1929--not April 23, 1928. Shirley (and the world) did not learn of this PR deception until 1941, when she turned thirteen. Her mom did not want Shirley to enter her teens without knowing it. To this day, when Shirley Temple Black remembers her childhood in great detail, she frequently recalls her age incorrectly. For example, on her last day as a child star on the Twentieth Century Fox lot, she recalls that she was eleven years old in her autobiography Child Star. In actuality, she was twelve years old on that date in May of 1940 and about to be unemployed for a while.

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15y ago

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