Mickey Kuhn, child actor in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ dead at 90
Mickey Kuhn, the busy child actor of the 1930s and ’40s who played Beau Wilkes, the son of Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard’s characters, in Gone With the Wind, has died. He was 90.
Kuhn died Sunday in a hospice facility in Naples, Florida, his wife, Barbara, told The Hollywood Reporter. He was in excellent health until recently, she said.
Kuhn also portrayed the ward of a famous movie cop in Dick Tracy (1945) and younger versions of Kirk Douglas and Montgomery Clift in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and John Wayne’s Red River (1948), respectively.
And in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Kuhn reunited with GWTW actress Vivien Leigh to appear as a sailor who gives Blanche DuBois directions. (Was he Leigh’s good luck charm? She won her two best actress Oscars with him in the cast.)
Kuhn was 6 when he made Gone With the Wind (1939), and in a 2014 interview with The Washington Post, he recalled how he kept flubbing a scene with Clark Gable. “My line was, ‘Hello, Uncle Rhett,'” he said. “I kept saying, ‘Hello, Uncle Clark.'” It took him a few takes to get it right.
In all, Kuhn worked in six films released in 1939, including King of the Underworld, starring Humphrey Bogart; Juarez, featuring Bette Davis and Paul Muni (he made $100 a week for playing a Mexican crown prince, he said); and When Tomorrow Comes, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer.
His big-screen résumé also included two James Stewart films, Magic Town (1947) and Broken Arrow (1950), as well as I Want a Divorce (1940), One Foot in Heaven (1941), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Searching Wind (1946), High Conquest (1947) and Scene of the Crime (1949).