Sharyn Moffett, Hollywood child star best known as Cary Grant’s daughter in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House – obituary

Sharyn Moffett, who has died aged 85, was a popular child actress in Hollywood who was often likened to her screen contemporary Margaret O’Brien both for her acting skills and her ability to move audiences.

“Whatever I had, it worked,” she said not long before her death. “Directors were impressed that at such a young age I could just relate to a storyline and cry accordingly. Working with dogs helped. There’s an instant attraction there.”

She is best remembered for two films: the tearjerker Child of Divorce (1946), in which she had top billing as an eight-year-old used as a pawn by her parents during their (both mentally and physically) violent marital break-up.

In addition, she was one of the two daughters in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as a couple squeezed into a poky city apartment who discover the pitfalls of buying a dilapidated country house and trying to live in it while renovation work goes on. (The film would inspire the 1986 film The Money Pit, starring Tom Hanks.)

“I dreamt Cary Grant was my own father,” Sharyn Moffett recalled. “He was charming, and that voice – so calming to me as a child.””

Patricia Sharyn Moffett was born in Alameda, California, on September 12 1936 to show business parents who had met working in Hollywood; her father R E Moffett was a singer, her mother Gladyce Lloyd Roberts a dancer who had appeared in Flying Down to Rio.

Ambitious for their daughter, they moved to Beverly Hills, and young Sharyn was on the big screen before she could walk, cast when 11 months old in In Old Chicago starring Tyrone Power.

She had a minor role in the Three Stooges knock-about short, Even as IOU (1942), before winning the lead role as a girl who falls in love with a German Shepherd dog owned by the US Military in the patriotic RKO movie My Pal Wolf (1944).

Though saccharine at times, the film, with its tag line “She’ll Steal Your Heart Away!”, pulled in the audiences and led to a seven-year contract with RKO. Cashing in on Sharyn Moffett’s obvious rapport with the canines, the studio cast her in further emotional yarns with a simple formula: girl loves dog, dog loves girl.

These included the surprisingly unsentimental A Boy, a Girl and a Dog (1946), Banjo (1947), and Rusty Leads the Way (1948), the sixth in the “Rusty” series. She played a shy, lonely, blind girl who looks set to be sent to a state institution before a friend intervenes to make sure she gets a guide-dog, enabling her to go to a mainstream school.

But despite the film’s success, her character was not reprised, and she began to find film offers dwindling.

She had also had roles that did not revolve around dogs, including The Body Snatcher with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and one of a detective series, The Falcon in San Francisco. In the comedy The Judge Steps Out (1948) she appeared alongside her younger brother Gregory.

Her final big-screen outing was in 1951 in Girls Never Tell, aka Her First Romance, alongside fellow former child stars Margaret O’Brien and Larry Simms, but it was not a success.

Sharyn Moffett tried her hand at television but retired in 1955 after an episode of Fireside Theatre. She married James Forrest and moved to Pennsylvania, where she and her husband were Episcopalian ministers. Changing her name to Sharon to follow the Biblical spelling, she became national president of the Big Sisters youth mentoring organisation and enjoyed the trickle of fan mail that continued to arrive.

Last year she was interviewed for Thomas Hamilton’s documentary Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster.

Sharyn Moffett’s husband died in 2011.

Sharyn Moffett, born September 12 1936, died December 23 2021