Claude Jarman Jr.
Claude Jarman Jr was born in Nashville, Tennessee. As a child, he acted in productions of the Nashville Community Playhouse’s Children’s Theater.
Jarman was 10 years old and in the fifth grade in Nashville when he was discovered in a nationwide talent search by MGM Studios, and was cast as the lead actor in the film The Yearling (1946).
His performance received glowing reviews and he received a special Academy Award as outstanding child actor of 1946 as a result. He continued his studies at the MGM studio school, and made a total of 11 films. By the time he reached his early twenties he chose to leave his film career behind. Republic Studios cast him in a couple of B-movies, but discouraged, he moved back to Tennessee to finish college at Vanderbilt University.
Following coursework in pre-law at Vanderbilt, Jarman appeared in Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), which was his final movie. After that, he served three years in the U.S. Navy, doing public relations work.[6]
Jarman moved to working behind the scenes. He ran the San Francisco Film Festival for 15 years (1965–1980) and was known for his in-depth retrospectives of movie stars and directors. He was Executive Producer of the music documentary film Fillmore (1972), about rock impresario Bill Graham. He returned to acting with a role on an episode of the television production Centennial (1978). Jarman was a special guest as a past acting award winner at both the 1998 and 2003 Academy Awards Ceremonies.[5] He served as Director of Cultural Affairs for the City of San Francisco. He founded Jarman Travel Inc. in 1986 to serve the travel needs of corporations and executives.
Jarman has seven children by three wives, including two daughters with his current wife, Katharine. In 2018, he wrote a book about his life titled My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood.
Tcm obituary in 2025.
Claude Jarman Jr. (The Yearling, 1946)
Claude Jarman Jr. was 10 years old when he was chosen out of 19,000 candidates by director Clarence Brown to portray Jody, a lonely Florida farm boy who adopts an orphaned fawn in The Yearling (1946). This adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1939 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel costarred Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman as Jody’s parents. The film was one of MGM’s biggest hits, and Jarman received a Juvenile Academy Award for his performance—one of only 12 child actors to receive the honor before it was discontinued in 1960. A star was born. Under contract to MGM, Jarman was educated in the studio’s schoolhouse alongside classmates Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret O’Brien and Jane Powell. Over the next decade, he appeared in 11 films, including The Sun Comes Up (1949), a Lassie adventure that marked Jeanette MacDonald’s final big screen role; Intruder in the Dust (1949), based on William Faulkner’s novel about a Black man falsely accused of murder; and Rio Grande (1950), in which he played the Civil War soldier son of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.
In an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, Jarman said Intruder in the Dust was his favorite because it anticipated To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) in “dealing with a subject ahead of its time.” Rio Grande, he added, was the most fun to make—he even won over notoriously stern director John Ford. Jarman was the last surviving participant from an iconic group photo of nearly 60 MGM stars, including Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Katharine Hepburn and Judy Garland, taken in honor of the studio’s 25th anniversary. He left Hollywood in the mid-1950s as the studio system declined, and he settled in the Bay Area, where he served as executive director of the San Francisco Film Society (now SFFILM) from 1965 through 1980. In 2018, he published his memoir, “My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood.” He died in January at the age of 90