Mickey Kuhn, child actor who was the last credited cast member of the classic 1939 film Gone With the Wind – obituary

Mickey Kuhn, who has died aged 90, was a 1930s child actor best known for playing Beau Wilkes, the son of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes (Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland), in Gone With the Wind (1939); he was thought to have been the last credited cast member from the Civil War epic that won eight Academy Awards.

Kuhn had appeared in several films when the casting call came for Gone With the Wind and he arrived to find about 100 children in the crowded waiting room. His mother told him to give the lady at the desk his name. “She said, ‘Mickey, we’ve been waiting for you’,” he told the Naples Daily News in 2017, adding that the receptionist then disappointed the other hopefuls by announcing that the role had been filled.

One of his most memorable scenes in the film was outside the bedroom in which his mother dies and he is in the arms of his father asking: “Where is my mother going away to? And why can’t I go along, please?” Yet he was not seen in any scenes with his screen mother. “She was always behind the door dying,” he explained. He did not in fact meet Olivia de Havilland until her 90th-birthday party in California in 2006, and thereafter they spoke every year on her birthday.

In another scene Kuhn was in a playroom with Bonnie Butler, the daughter of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), when Rhett walked in. Kuhn’s line was “Hello, Uncle Rhett,” but he was so smitten with Cammie King, the five-year-old playing Bonnie, that he fluffed the words several times by saying: “Hello, Uncle Clark.” Eventually Gable pulled him to one side for a fatherly session in how to stay focused on the job in hand.

One of Kuhn’s other significant film roles was when he was 18 and played a sailor in the early scenes of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), directing Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois to the correct tram that would take her to the home of her sister, Stella. It meant he was the only other actor to appear in both of Vivien Leigh’s Oscar-winning movies. When the actress learnt that they had previously worked together, she requested a meeting during a break in filming. “She asked about my career and what I had been doing,” he recalled. “She was just one of the nicest people I have ever met.”

Despite his somewhat limited film career, Kuhn had an endless supply of Hollywood anecdotes. On one occasion he had been eating lunch in a studio cafeteria with his mother when a man walked by in military uniform with a gun at his hip. Kuhn stared like any awestruck child would until eventually the man in question, Gregory Peck, came over and asked if he wanted to inspect the weapon.

In 1950, Kuhn was in Arizona to film Broken Arrow, starring James Stewart. An assistant director told him to get on a horse and follow the trail to the set. He did as instructed but a few minutes later a horseman rode up. “He said: ‘Mickey? … Jim Stewart. It was Magic Town [1947]. Wasn’t it the last time we worked together?’” Kuhn was amazed that the star of It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) had remembered him.

John Wayne was his favourite actor. In one scene in Red River, a Western filmed in 1946 but held back for two years, Wayne’s character had to hit Kuhn’s young version of Matt Garth. The older man asked in advance if he could really smack the teenager. “I looked up to him – and what can you say to a big movie star?’ Kuhn recalled. “I said, ‘That’s fine, Mr Wayne,’ and he smacked me good.”

Theodore Matthew Michael Kuhn was born in Waukegan, north of Chicago, Illinois, on September 21 1932. He was the younger of two children of Mickey Kuhn Sr, a meat cutter, and his wife Pearl (née Hicks). During the Depression the family moved in search of a better life to Hollywood, where his father found steady employment with Safeway Foods.

At 18 months, young Mickey featured in a “better babies pageant”. Not long afterwards he was with his mother in a Sears-Roebuck store in Santa Monica, California, when they were approached by a woman with a baby in her arms. She had heard that Fox Studios had a casting call for young twins the next day and suggested that the two toddlers could pass as twins. The film was Change of Heart (1934), with Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor – the only film, quipped Kuhn, in which he appeared without his clothes on.

More movies followed, including A Doctor’s Life (1937) with George Bancroft and Helen Burgess, although the infant Kuhn often appeared uncredited. By the age of four he was being promoted in newspapers with a line drawing emphasising his blond locks above the words: “Mickey Kuhn of Hollywood, age 3 years [sic], can speak and sing in 4 languages: Spanish, French, German, English.”

He was chosen from more than 50 children to appear in the historical drama Juarez (1939), with Paul Muni and Bette Davis. “That was my first big break,” he said. “I made $100 a week.” He played Crown Prince Augustin, heir to the Mexican throne, a complex role for a six-year-old. As filming went along William Dieterle, the director, let him keep the props he had been working with, including games, toys and uniforms.

Like many Hollywood child actors and their parents, Kuhn was disappointed to be shunned for one of the Munchkin roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939) with Judy Garland, though the reason soon became clear. “All the Munchkins were real dwarfs,” he said.

Film work dropped off during the war, something his mother attributed to the family’s German name, and instead he appeared on stage and in radio plays. Leaving St Monica High School in Santa Monica in 1951, he enlisted for four years in the US Navy, serving in the Pacific during the Korean war.

Afterwards he tried to return to acting, but the only real opportunities were television shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which did not appeal. Instead he went to college and, after a series of odd jobs, joined American Airlines, working his way up from aircraft cleaner and baggage handler to check-in clerk and cabin crew supervisor.

Later he moved into management at National (now Ronald Reagan) airport in Washington. On one occasion he spotted Bette Davis coming through the terminal and rushed over to be reacquainted, but after explaining that they had appeared together in Juarez he was dismissed with a cursory: “That’s nice.”

Kuhn retired to Naples, Florida, where he volunteered at a local hospital, transporting patients and visitors from their cars to the front door in a golf buggy. At home his “den” was filled with framed movie posters, while a replica John Wayne gun holster was displayed on the table. A bedroom in his apartment was dedicated to ephemera from Gone With the Wind.

Mickey Kuhn’s first four marriages were dissolved. In 1985 he married Barbara Traci, an American Airlines colleague. She survives him with two children from his first marriage.

Mickey Kuhn, born September 21 1932, died November 20 2022