‏Helen Parrish‏

The daughter of stage and bit film actress Laura Parrish, she started in movies at the ripe old age of four, playing Babe Ruth's daughter in the silent Babe Comes Home (1927). She also was featured in "Our Gang" comedy shorts and sometimes played the lead character as a child opposite some of the great femme stars of the day. In her teens she made herself known as a kid sister but is probably most notable as the bane of sweet Deanna Durbin's existence in several of her vehicles, playing a jealous, spiteful teen rival of some sort. Their first film together, Mad About Music (1938), worked so well that they formed a sort of Shirley Temple/Jane Withers standoff in a couple of other movie confections for Universal. Most of her films were pleasant but unexceptional and in the "B" category, including X Marks the Spot (1931), When a Feller Needs a Friend (1932), A Dog of Flanders (1935), I'm Nobody's Sweetheart Now (1940), Too Many Blondes (1941), X Marks the Spot (1942) (same name, different plot from her earlier film), and The Wolf Hunters (1949).

By her mid-20s she was finished in pictures and she turned to TV. Her brother Robert Parrish was a minor child actor who earned respect as a film editor and director and her other sister Beverly died suddenly at the age of 11 after filming only one movie. Her first husband was screenwriter Charles Lang and her second TV producer John Guedel, who survived her. Born in 1923 (references vary, including 1922 and 1924), her untimely death from cancer in 1959 prevented her from showing her true potential as an actress.