Mickey Kuhn Obituary, Death – Mickey Kuhn, who played Beau Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, died yesterday. Please accept our deepest sympathies to his family, friends, and the GWTW fans he adored.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Mickey Kuhn was a Hollywood staple child actor, playing alongside many top Hollywood stars, from Leslie Howard and Conrad Nagel’s son to Dick Tracy’s ward. However, once he reached the “awkward adolescent” stage, he found himself primarily unemployed or in unbilled parts, and he looked for other sources of career fulfillment.
Theodore Matthew Michael Kuhn, Jr. was born on September 21, 1932, in Waukegan, Illinois, as the younger of two children to Theodore Sr. and the former Pearl Hicks. His family moved to Hollywood during the Great Depression, where his father found steady work as a meat cutter. Mickey was cast by Fox Studios at the age of two in the film Change of Heart (1934), starring the preeminent movie couple of the time, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.
He made his film debut as a 5-year-old in Paramount’s A Doctor’s Diary, while attending kindergarten at the Mark-Ken School for Professional Children (1937). His devoted mother oversaw and protected him for the majority of his young career. With roles such as Crown Prince Augustin in the “A” film Juarez (1939), starring Paul Muni and Bette Davis, and Ashley Wilkes’ son Beau in the Civil War classic Gone with the Wind, Mickey and Hollywood had a successful year in 1939.
While he never became a moppet star, he was a dependable and quick learner who appeared in a few high-profile films during the 1940s, including One Foot in Heaven (1941), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and Red River (1946). (1946). (1946). (1948). He was a horse enthusiast who starred in action films such as S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939), Roaring Rangers (1946), and Broken Arrow (1947). (1947). (1947). (1950).
In between film shoots, he turned to the stage as a teenager, performing at the Pasadena Playhouse and other Los Angeles-area theaters. However, fewer opportunities presented themselves to him, so he enlisted in the Navy in 1951. He returned to film and television in 1955, after serving four years in the military, but with little fanfare. He married and had two children around this time. He used his G.I. Bill to attend L.A. Valley College and Cal State Northridge, where he majored in Theater Arts and worked a variety of odd jobs to supplement his income.
In 1965, he was hired as a flight attendant supervisor by American Airlines. He later became an administrative manager at a Boston airport. After his divorce in 1984, he remarried and retired from the airlines in 1995. He recently gave historical tours of and around Boston, as well as appearing at several film festivals. He received the Golden Boot Award for his work in westerns in 2005.
