Helen Parrish

The daughter of stage and bit film actress Laura Parrish, she started in movies at the ripe old age of four, playing Babe Ruth's daughter in the silent Babe Comes Home (1927).She was also featured in "Our Gang" comedy shorts and sometimes played the lead character as a child opposite some of the great femme stars of the day. In her teens she made herself known as a kid sister but is probably most notable as the bane of existence to sweet Deanna Durbin in several of her vehicles, playing a jealous, spiteful teen rival of some sort. Their first film together, Délicieuse (1938), worked so well they formed a sort of Shirley Temple/Jane Withers standoff in a couple of other movie confections for Universal. Most of her films were pleasant but unexceptional and in the "B" category, including Le reportage tragique (1931), Amitié (1932), A Dog of Flanders (1935), I'm Nobody's Sweetheart Now (1940), Too Many Blondes (1941), X Marks the Spot (1942) (same name, different plot from her earlier film), and The Wolf Hunters (1949).By her mid-20s she was finished in pictures and turned to TV.Her brother Robert Parrish was a minor child actor who earned respect as a film editor and director and her older sister, Beverly, died suddenly at the age of 11 after filming only one movie.Her first husband was actor/screenwriter Charles Lang and her second was TV producer John Guedel, who survived her.Born in 1923 (references vary, including 1922 and 1924), her untimely death from cancer in 1959, at age 35, prevented her from showing her true potential as an actress. Show less «