Cora Sue Collins, who as a dimpled, chubby-cheeked child actress in the early 1930s appeared opposite A-list stars like Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, but who cut her career short after being sexually harassed by a screenwriter, died on April 27 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 98.
Her daughter, Susie McKay Krieser, said the cause was complications of a stroke.
Miss Collins made about 50 pictures over 13 years, including 11 in 1934 and another 11 in 1935. She was one of the era’s galaxy of child stars, a list that included Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but she did not become as famous as they did.
In her first movie, the 1932 comedy “The Unexpected Father,” she played a waif whose newly wealthy adoptive father (Slim Summerville) hires a nurse (ZaSu Pitts) to care for her. Praise for 4-year-old Cora Sue came quickly.
A critic for The Richmond News Leader in Virginia labeled her a “baby star” with “amazing acting ability and an appeal that walks right into your heart.” The Kansas City Journal wrote, “The little Collins girl walks away with the picture.”
Miss Collins played Garbo as a child in “Queen Christina,” the acclaimed 1933 movie about the Swedish monarch. At the time, she told one newspaper that Garbo “ was so friendly and liked my new teeth a lot.”
Her many other roles include the daughter of Claudette Colbert in “Torch Song” (1933); Myrna Loy and William Powell’s daughter in “Evelyn Prentice” (1934); and the younger selves of Norma Shearer in “Smilin’ Through” (1932), Frances Dee in “The Strange Case of Clara Deane” (1932) and Ms. Oberon in “The Dark Angel” (1935).
“I must have had a very common face,” Miss Collins said in a 2014 interview with the online journal Film Talk. She added: “I played everybody as a child. I guess they could make me up to look like anyone. Yet I hope they weren’t paying me for nothing. Movies were incredibly magical to me back then.”
She developed a friendship with Garbo, which began on the set of “Queen Christina,” continued when Miss Collins was cast as her niece in “Anna Karenina” (1935), and lasted through her visits as an adult to Garbo’s homes in New York and Paris.
“Until she passed away, I called her Miss Garbo and she called me Cora Sue, which was correct,” Miss Collins told Film Talk.
Cora Sue Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in Beckley, W.Va. Her father, Young Commodore Collins, and her mother, Clyde (Richardson) Collins, separated when Cora Sue was 3 (after her mother discovered that her father had given his secretary a mink coat for Christmas) and later divorced. Her mother took Cora Sue and her older sister, Madge, to Hollywood by train.
In a story that Miss Collins called “the honest-to-God truth,” she said that her mother and sister were heading to register her sister in school when a huge car pulled up to them.
“A woman jumped out of the car and said, ‘Excuse me, would you like to put your little girl in pictures?’” she said in an interview with the website Cinephiled in 2015. “Of course, my mother said, ‘Yes!’ The woman said, ‘Get in the car with me, there’s a big casting going on right now at Universal.’”
They delayed going to the studio for a few hours until Madge had been enrolled. Miss Collins was cast in “The Unexpected Father.”
A 1935 profile of Miss Collins in The Oakland Tribune reported that she had a 151 I.Q. and that she had been voted the most popular Hollywood child actor by her peers. The author of the profile, Marion Simms, was with the Collinses one morning when the actor Pat O’Brien, who had become Cora Sue’s friend and whom she called “Uncle Pat,” stopped by to take her to school.
Miss Collins also worked with James Cagney in “Picture Snatcher” (1933), Bette Davis in “All This, and Heaven Too” (1940), Colleen Moore in “The Scarlet Letter” (1934) and Sylvia Sidney in “Jennie Gerhardt” (1933).
As Miss Collins aged, her roles dwindled. Before her 17th birthday, she said, she was a victim of harassment when Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter at MGM whom she viewed as a father figure, offered her a big role if she would sleep with him. She turned him down, started to cry and left his office.
“I would have given my right arm to play that role,” she told Film Masters, a consortium of cinema historians and enthusiasts, in 2024.
She reported Mr. Ruskin’s behavior to Louis B. Mayer, the powerful chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where she was a contract player at the time. But, as she recalled, he said, “You’ll get used to it, sweetie.” Soon after, he threatened to keep her from ever working in movies again.
“Mr. Mayer, that’s my heartfelt desire,” she said she told him, adding, “It was the best decision of my life.”
At Mr. Mayer’s request, she appeared in one more film, “Week-End at the Waldorf” (1945), whose cast also included Ginger Rogers and Lana Turner.
Miss Collins’s marriages to Ivan Stauffer, James McKay and Jim Cox ended in divorce. Her marriage to Harry Nace Jr., who owned movie theaters in Arizona, lasted 33 years and ended with his death in 2002. She became known as Susie Nace during and after their marriage.
“It’s fun to be a housewife in Phoenix,” she told Film Talk. “I like it.”
In addition to Ms. Krieser, whose father was Mr. McKay, she is survived by a son, Harry Nace III; a stepdaughter, Teresa Nace Cabebe; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Seven decades after making “The Unexpected Father,” Miss Collins remembered a scene from that movie that involved a bootlegger.
“I was being pushed around in a baby carriage with all of these bottles of booze under me,” she told Film Talk. “They put actual bottles there; I think they were filled with bathtub gin or something, and it hurt like hell, but I was a very obedient child and I didn’t tell them how damned uncomfortable I was!”
