Claude Jarman Jr., who received a Juvenile Academy Award for his heart-tugging performance as the boy who adopts an orphaned fawn in the 1946 MGM classic The Yearling, died Sunday. He was 90.
Jarman died in his sleep of natural causes at his Marin County home in Kentfield, California, his wife, Katie, told THR‘s Scott Feinberg.
In films released in 1949, Jarman starred with Jeanette MacDonald in the Lassie movie The Sun Comes Up, played the brother of a rancher on the run (Robert Sterling) in Roughshod and reteamed with Yearling director Clarence Brown to portray a youngster out to prove the innocence of a Black man in Intruder in the Dust, based on the William Faulkner novel and filmed in Oxford, Mississippi.
A year later, he played the son of a cavalry officer (John Wayne) in John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950).
Born on Sept. 27, 1934, Jarman was the 10-year-old son of a Nashville railroad accountant when Brown came to his fifth-grade classroom on Valentine’s Day 1945 while randomly visiting schools in the South to scout kids for The Yearling.
“Next thing, they called three days later and said, ‘Get ready to leave for Hollywood in a week,’” Jarman recalled in a 2016 interview with Alan K. Rode for the Film Noir Foundation.
He was soon hired to play Jody Baxter, the lonely son of Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman’s characters, in The Yearling, adapted from the 1939 book by Pulitzer Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
He said it took about two years in Florida to finish the movie; one shot with a deer involved needed 115 takes to get on film. And to promote the feature, he once walked with a deer on a leash down Fifth Avenue in New York.
At the 1947 Oscars, Jarman was presented with his Juvenile Academy Award from Shirley Temple at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. He was the seventh youngster to get the miniature trophy, 12 years after Temple was the first. (Years later, the Academy gifted him with a regular-size Oscar, and he proudly displayed both in his home.)
Asked what he thought of his success in those early days during a 2014 interview with the Marina Times, Jarman replied, “I had nothing to compare it to. I thought, ‘Doesn’t everyone have this?’ I had my own dressing room, my own makeup person and wardrobe person.”
He attended school on the MGM lot, where his classmates included Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Powell, Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell. And while he was making Roughshod at RKO, he and Natalie Wood studied together.
Back at MGM, he appeared in flashbacks as the younger version of Van Johnson’s character, a pilot lost at sea, in High Barbaree (1947).
In April 1949, he appeared with more than four dozen MGM stars, including Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Angela Lansbury, Errol Flynn, Esther Williams, Judy Garland and Lassie in a photo to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the studio. He was the last surviving person from that iconic shot.
Jarman returned to Nashville in 1950 to finish high school but appeared in Hangman’s Knot (1952), starring Randolph Scott, Donna Reed and Lee Marvin and directed by Roy Huggins. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1956, the same year he was seen in the Fess Parker-starring The Great Locomotive Chase.
He came back to L.A. as an Armed Forces publicist, working with studios to make movies about the Navy, then moved to San Francisco in 1963 as an employee for the John Hancock Insurance Co.
From 1965-80, Jarman headed the San Francisco International Film Festival. He received the fest’s George Gund III Craft of Cinema Award in 2019 for “elegantly leveraging his success as a young actor to promote the art of film, bringing together the industry and Bay Area community in ways that reverberate to this day.”
Jarman also produced a 1972 documentary about music promoter Bill Graham and the Fillmore Auditorium and acted one last time in the 1978-79 NBC miniseries Centennial.
His book, My Life and the Final Days of Hollywood, was published in 2018.
In addition to his wife (his third), survivors include his children, Claude III, Murray, Elizabeth, Vanessa, Natalie, Sarah and Charlotte, and eight grandchildren. He will be buried in Nashville, and a celebration of his life, to take place in San Francisco, is being planned.
