Edith Fellows

Known for ActingBorn 1923-05-20Died 2011-06-26Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Edith Fellows was born on May 20, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts. When she was a year old, she and her father and grandmother moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. As a toddler, Edith was pigeon-toed and had trouble walking, and one doctor suggested that dance lessons might cure this condition. At age four, Edith entered Henderson's School of Dance, where she was spotted by a man claiming to be a talent scout, who told her grandmother that he could get Edith into show business for a fifty-dollar fee. The dance school raised the money, but when Edith and her grandmother arrived in Hollywood, they discovered that the address the man had given them did not exist, and they realized he was a fraud. Stranded in Hollywood with no means to return to North Carolina, Edith's grandmother began doing housework to earn a living. While she worked, she left Edith with a neighbor and her young son. One day Edith was taken along when the neighbor's son had an audition for the film Movie Night (1929), and she ended up getting the part. Although she never become a child star, Edith appeared in many popular films of the 1930s, most notably Pennies from Heaven (1936). She also proved herself to be a very versatile actress, playing roles ranging from a spoiled rich girl, as in Heart of the Rio Grande (1942), to a poor orphan girl, as in Pennies from Heaven. Edith was even given her own series, The Five Little Peppers, while under contract to Columbia, and she made four of the Pepper films (the first was Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1939)) in two years. Between 1929 and 1954, Edith appeared in some fifty films, mostly in juvenile roles due to her short 4' 10" stature. But her career suddenly slowed down in the mid-1950s. Between 1955 and 1980, she appeared in only one film, Lilith (1964), in which she had a bit part. During this time, Edith chose to focus on her family life; she had married producer Freddie Fields in 1946, and their only child, daughter Kathy, was born in 1947. But Edith and Fields divorced in 1955, and the end of her marriage, coupled with other factors, caused Edith to have a nervous breakdown. She recovered, and in 1981, she returned to acting in numerous supporting roles on television. In 1985, fellow former child actor Jackie Cooper announced plans to make a TV movie based on Edith's life, but this project never happened.Read more

Movies & web series

Hedda Hopper's Hollywood No. 4

Girls' Town

Little Miss Roughneck

Hollywood’s Children

Heart of the Rio Grande

Alan Ladd: The True Quiet Man

The Rider of Death Valley

The Brady Brides

ER

Tugboat Princess

This Side of Heaven

Between Two Brothers

Cagney & Lacey

She Married Her Boss

Two Alone

Five Little Peppers in Trouble

Pennies from Heaven

Dinky

Birthday Blues

Nobody's Children

Five Little Peppers at Home

Five Little Peppers And How They Grew

The Little Adventuress

Huckleberry Finn

Grace Kelly

Divorce In The Family

Pride of the Blue Grass

Mush and Milk

Life Begins with Love

Lilith

Kid Millions

Movie Night

The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell

Emma

Her First Beau

Music in My Heart

Her First Romance

And So They Were Married

Madame X

St. Elsewhere

Criminal Investigator

Out West with the Peppers

City Streets

In the Mood

The Keeper of the Bees

One Way Ticket

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

Cross Streets