Lon McCallister

Actor of perennial boyishness

One of the most popular young screen actors of the Forties, Lon McCallister had an ingenuous appeal that made him a favourite of family audiences, and was particularly at home in outdoor settings featuring dogs and horses. Ultimately his perennial boyishness and slight stature became a handicap for more mature roles, a fact he acknowledged by retiring at the age of 30 for a successful business career.

The son of a real estate broker, he was born Herbert Alonzo McCallister Jnr in 1923 in Los Angeles, and attended Marken Professional School, which trained children for show-business careers. He made his screen début at the age of 12 in Romeo and Juliet (1936), in which the director George Cukor, who described him as "the perfect choirboy", favoured him with a large close-up:

He always joked about my close-up in the final cut – he said it was due to Oliver Messel's request, yet George supervised every frame during the editing process.

Cukor was to be a lifelong friend – according to his biographers, McCallister was his closest friend during the last 20 years of his life, and key scenes in Cukor's film Rich and Famous (1981) were filmed in McCallister's Malibu home.

McCallister's many films as a boy actor included Stella Dallas (1937), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and Babes in Arms (1939), and the columnist Hedda Hopper described him as "the cutest boy the movies have hauled up out of obscurity since Mickey Rooney". Films such as Henry Aldrich for President (1941) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) preceded his major breakthrough in Stage Door Canteen (1943), Hollywood's tribute to the venue where stars served coffee and danced with servicemen. In a memorable scene, McCallister is a bashful soldier awestruck at being served by the famed actress Katherine Cornell (in her only screen appearance). When he tells her that he played in Romeo and Juliet in high school, she cues him into the balcony scene, which they recite together.

The film started a decade of stardom, and when he was drafted 20th Century-Fox were able to get him released from cryptography school in the Signal Corps to star in Cukor's screen version of Moss Hart's play about the training of a bomber crew, Winged Victory (1944) – all the other male principals were from the Broadway cast. He then starred alongside two other newcomers, Jeanne Crain and June Haver, in Home in Indiana (1944); McCallister played a city boy who goes to live with a horse-breeding aunt and uncle in the prettily photographed family film which confirmed the star status of all three young players.

After discharge from the army, he starred in Thunder in the Valley (1947) as a youth, neglected by his father, who raises a collie as a sheepdog. One of his best movies was the chilling mystery The Red House (1947), in which he and Allene Roberts were a young couple who discover why Roberts's step-father (Edward G. Robinson) is determined to let no one visit a sinister house in the woods. Roberts recently described the actor as "one of the most caring men – sensitive towards others – that I have ever known".

Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! (1948), one of Marilyn Monroe's early films, was more rural Americana (the title referred to the yells made when training mules), and The Big Cat (1949) told of a hunt for a cougar. The Boy from Indiana (1950) was a mild racetrack drama in which he was a horse-loving jockey, but another racing tale, The Story of Seabiscuit (1949), had more points of interest – it teamed McCallister with the former child superstar Shirley Temple, and featured three segments of actual race footage showing the legendary Seabiscuit on the track. McCallister's final film role was that of a frightened youth who finds courage during the Korean War in Combat Squad (1953), after which he retired from the screen. "Being a movie star was great," he said, "but I never considered doing it for a lifetime."

Independently wealthy from shrewd investments during his early career, he speculated in real estate, owning houses and apartment buildings, and had a lavish home in Malibu. For several years his companion was the actor William Eythe, a Fox contract player who starred with Tallulah Bankhead in the film A Royal Scandal (1945), and played on Broadway in the Cole Porter musical Out of This World (1950). Eythe died of a heart attack in 1957. Among the other close friends with whom McCallister kept in contact were the former child stars Deanna Durbin and Jane Withers.

"I loved being in pictures," he said,

but I love privacy more. I wanted to blend into a crowd, to go where I pleased without causing a traffic jam. I've succeeded in this and I'm happy.

Tom Vallance