Ted Donaldson, Hollywood teen star who worked with Cary Grant, Edward G Robinson and Gregory Peck – obituary

Ted Donaldson, who has died aged 89, rose to prominence as a teen star during the tail-end of the Second World War, working alongside a string of Hollywood A-listers, including Edward G Robinson and Cary Grant.

“I did my first movie with Cary Grant, and it was extraordinary,” he wrote in 2016. “It was perhaps the greatest personal and professional experience of my life… I loved him!”

The film was Once Upon a Time (1944); its distinctly odd plot revolved around “Pinkie” (11-year-old Ted) and his dancing caterpillar “Curly”, which Grant’s conniving showman tries to get his hands on. Variety adjudged it “One of the more novel scripts of the year. Once Upon a Time is certainly bizarre – and yet charming. It’s unfathomable – and yet intriguing. It is certainly absurd – and yet box office.”

Ted Donaldson was born in Brooklyn on August 20 1933; his father was the songwriter and composer Will Donaldson. His mother Jo died when he was a few months old, and Will married the composer and organist Muriel Pollock.

Young Ted showed a knack for performing early on, entertaining his schoolmates with his magic tricks at the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, founded in 1914 for aspiring actors and dancers.

Aged eight, he arrived on Broadway in the comedy Life With Father, following it with Sons and Soldiers (1943), which featured Gregory Peck. Ted’s performance alerted Hollywood, and in 1944 he was signed by Columbia for Once Upon a Time. He reprised his role on radio for The Screen Guild Theater in 1945, with Robert Montgomery as the impresario.

Audiences fell for the boy’s charms and he was given a prominent role as an orphan, opposite Edward G Robinson and Ruth Warwick, in the comedy Mr Winkle Goes to War, aka Arms and the Woman (1944).

The following year he was loaned to 20th Century-Fox for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Elia Kazan’s debut feature about an impoverished Irish-American family starring Dorothy McGuire and Joan Blondell. The Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper enthused: “This boy Teddy is going places!”

Attempting to capitalise on the success of the Lassie films over at MGM, the head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, assigned Donaldson to play Danny Mitchell in the “Rusty” film series about a young boy and his German shepherd dog. Eight B-movies were shot between 1945 and 1949, during which time he also had parts in non-canine films such as Personality Kid, in which he played a boy who runs away with his pet donkey after his older brother strikes him (1946); The Decision of Christopher Blake (1948), about a boy who is forced to choose between his divorcing parents; and the ahead-of-its-time eco-farming drama The Green Promise (1949).

That year, Donaldson returned to radio, as Bud (the son of Robert Young’s character) in the radio run of Father Knows Best, a sitcom about a Midwestern family. That lasted until 1954; by then he had made his last credited appearance on the big screen, still in his teens, in the noir drama Phone Call From a Stranger (1952), starring Bette Davis. “From my very early 20s I wanted to be the first male child actor to become a leading man,” he said in 2016, “but it just wasn’t to be.”

There were a few TV credits, but by the end of the decade he had disappeared from view. He went on to work in the books trade and as a supply teacher.

In recent years, he had been a popular guest at film conventions, including the 2016 TCM Film Festival, when he was asked to introduce a restored version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He was due to attend this year’s Festival in April.

Ted Donaldson never married and leaves no survivors.

Ted Donaldson, born August 30 1933, died March 1 2023