Jean Darling: Child star who featured in dozens of Hal Roach's groundbreaking 'Our Gang' series of short comic films

She was scathing of the effect the film industry had on her generation of young actors

Darling: 'I got sick of working at about 13,' she recalled (Getty)

One of the last survivors of the silent film age, Jean Darling was a child actress who made regular appearances in Hal Roach's "Our Gang" films in the late 1920s. Also known as "The Little Rascals" series, the films – more than 200 shorts and one full-length film made between 1922 and 1944 – depicted the exploits of a group of children from a poor neighbourhood and aimed at a realistic style, with the children behaving as naturally as possible, rather than as mini-adults.

Improvisation was encouraged, and the characters – boys and girls, black and white – were treated with ground-breaking even-handedness, as equals in the eyes of society in a way their real-life counterparts on the streets could only dream of.

Darling was born Dorothy Jean LeVake in 1922, but her mother legally changed her name after her parents broke up when she was a few months old. She appeared in her first films and plays on as a babe in arms –"I was carried on stage and pinched to make me cry" – then got her big break when Roach's studio made her part of "Our Gang".

She had just turned four when she made the first of more than 30 "Our Gang" films, Bring Home the Turkey. Stardom followed swiftly, and she later recalled how fortunate she was to escape its more corrosive effects. "I thought I was a god," she said. "I was worshipped. That sort of thing could have destroyed me. I sometimes think the fact I was spared was just plain magic."

She went to acting school with another child star, "Baby Peggy" Montgomery, who said of her, "She seemed to be everything the rest of us kids wanted to be... what's more she was funny and talented."

Darling made her last "Our Gang" film, Bouncing Babies, in 1929, then embarked on a two-year tour of RKO theatres. "For the briefest time I was the highest paid blonde in Hollywood," she wrote. "Only Jackie Coogan and Baby Peggy were earning more than we kids in the 'Our Gang' series."

But she was scathing of the effect the film industry had on her generation of young actors. "Roach created movie stars and in turn monsters," she said. "Hollywood turned innocent children into horrid mini-adults and some of us had tragic ends. The sad thing was when we all grew up nobody wanted us to work in pictures any more. In the end many turned to drink and drugs. Some died penniless. I was one of the fortunate ones,"

She played Curley Locks in Babes in Toyland (1934) alongside Laurel and Hardy, who had teamed up at Roach's behest, while the same year, in Jane Eyre, she played Jane as a young child. But stardom was not to her taste.

"I got sick of working at about 13," she recalled two years ago. "I went down to the board of education and took examinations to graduate high school which I did with straight As."

She spent some years in New York studying voice and modelling and working in vaudeville. In 1942 she made her Broadway debut in Count Me In, and after wartime service entertaining the troops in Italy and North Africa she returned to Broadway as Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel, making 850 consecutive appearances, and she was also in the 1949 revival of Pal Joey.

She recalled, however, that "There was no great ambition. Like other child stars there was a key in my back. I'd been wound up by someone and was hitting all the marks." None the less, she made regular radio appearances, and in the 1950s she hosted the television shows, A Date with Jean Darling and The Singing Knit-Witch. In 1954 she married Reuben Bowen – or "Kajar" the television magician, and she appeared with him for a time. They had a son and settled in Ireland but were separated by the time he died in 1980.

Darling remained in Ireland, living in Dublin and writing mystery stories for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Whispers magazine. She also wrote and performed plays and stories for Irish radio and television, sometimes as "Aunty Poppy".

She made one final screen appearance, in 2013, in The Butler's Tale, a silent comedy short imitating the style of the "Our Gang" films in which she had made her name more than 80 years before.

Dorothy Jean LeVake (Jean Darling), actress, broadcaster and author: born Santa Monica, California 23 August 1922; married 1954 Reuben Bowen (died 1980); died Rödermark, Germany 4 September 2015.