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John R. Countryman, who billed as the child actor Johnny Russell appeared in films with Barbara Stanwyck, Tyrone Power, Shirley Temple and Jimmy Stewart before serving as a U.S. diplomat and ambassador in the Middle East and Africa, has died. He was 91.
Countryman died Dec. 14 in Loudoun, Virginia, after a short bout with pneumonia, his daughter, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Secretary Vanessa Countryman, told The Hollywood Reporter.
In the biggest role of his brief acting career, Russell portrayed Tyltyl, the younger brother of Temple’s Mytyl, in the fantasy film The Blue Bird (1940), which was Fox’s answer to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, released a year earlier. In a dream, the two kids set out on on a series of adventures.
Temple’s mother, Gertrude, was reportedly unhappy that her daughter was sharing so much screen time with the adorable Russell and sought to have him replaced, but producer Darryl F. Zanuck insisted that the youngster remain.
Russell had played Roddy, the son who Stanwyck’s Margot Weston gives up for adoption after her fiancé is killed just before her wedding, in the Fox drama Always Goodbye (1938). As the story goes, 489 boys between the ages of 4½ and 7 were “scanned and tested” in a month before Russell, then 5, won the role and a studio contract.
In 1939 films, Russell portrayed Jesse James Jr., son of Power’s title character, in the Fox outlaw drama Jesse James, and he was one of the Hopper Boys in the Frank Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at Columbia Pictures.
From left: Johnny Russell, Shirley Temple and Jessie Ralph in the 1940 film ‘The Blue Bird.’
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection
One of two kids, John Russell Countryman was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 25, 1933. His father, Russell, worked for the Associated Press as a photo and art editor; his mother, Lucille, was a Czech immigrant.
He started modeling when he was 3, and while in Los Angeles with his mom was picked to play the son of Allan Lane’s boxer The Duke Comes Back (1937). He appeared in another film that year, The Frame-Up.
Also billed as John or Johnnie Russell, he appeared in Five of a Kind (1938), Prison Break (1938), The Man Who Dared (1939), Sabotage (1939), Florian (1940), The Man I Married (1940) and Lady With Red Hair (1940).
When he and his parents decided he should have a “normal” childhood, Countryman attended the Jesuit military prep school St. Francis Xavier in New York and Fordham University and spent a year at the University of Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship.
He then had a three-year stint in the U.S. Air Force as a pilot and worked as a cityside reporter for a newspaper in Danbury, Connecticut.
Countryman came on active duty in the U.S. Foreign Service in February 1962 and reported to the diplomatic mission in Istanbul about a year later. He would have postings in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Gabon before serving from 1976-78 as deputy director and acting director of Arabian Peninsula Affairs at the U.S. State Department, when he dealt with the Iran hostage crisis.
(In the mid-1970s, he and Temple reconnected when he was stationed in Gabon and she was the U.S. ambassador to Ghana.)
Countryman was U.S. ambassador to Oman under President Reagan from 1981-85 before he retired from the Foreign Service in March 1987. He then worked in real estate and for the Mission for Peace and Cooperation in the Middle East.
“He was a true Renaissance man,” his daughter noted.
Survivors also include his wife, Illona, and his son-in-law, James. He was pre-deceased by his sister, Carol.
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