Returning to Marjory Allen's memoirs after my holiday, I've come across another passage that refers to it being illegal to employ actors under 13 in a British film until the early Sixties.
One of Lady Allen's many wartime good works was chairing the Advisory Council on Children's Entertainment Films between 1944 and 1950. She writes that J. Arthur Rank had launched Saturday morning film shows "to help relieve war stress amongst school-age children".
The problem was that no one was sure what sort of films children enjoyed, so Rank set up the advisory council that Lady Allen chaired. It found that what they most liked was films about other children.
Lady Allen continues:
We were in some difficulty over one of the complaints made by our alert and outspoken young critics. The insisted that all children's parts ought to be acted by children of the right age, but we were constrained by the government and local regulations which made it extremely hard to employ child actors at all.
The rules were not so strict in other countries and the problem was partly solved, after the war, by making some of our films abroad.
And I do recall seeing an adult film with a precocious little girl as a character on Talking Pictures TV. Something seemed odd about the actress, and when I checked her credits on IMDb she turned out to be pushing 30.
As I showed in an earlier post, this law was blatantly ignored by some producers, to the extent that two films with a child in the title role – Oliver Twist and Sammy Going South – were chosen for the Royal Film Performance before it was relaxed.
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