Mickey Kuhn was the last surviving credited cast member of Gone with the Wind. As a boy he worked with some of the biggest stars of the 1930s and 1940s and he was only six when he appeared in the classic Civil War melodrama as Beau Wilkes, Ashley and Melanie's son, who was left in tears after being told he was not allowed to see his mother on her deathbed.

Kuhn did not actually share any scenes with Olivia de Havilland, who played his screen mum, and it would be another 67 years before they met for the first time at her 90th birthday party in 2006.

By the time he made Gone with the Wind in 1939 he had already appeared in half a dozen films, beginning as a toddler in a 1934 drama called Change of Heart with Janet Gaynor and Ginger Rogers.

Mickey Kuhn at a 2009 event celebrating Gone With The Wind (Picture: Vince Bucci/Getty)

He would continue acting into the 1950s.One of his last films was the 1951 screen version of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, which reunited him with Gone with the Wind’s female lead Vivien Leigh.

He had only a tiny part as a nameless sailor who directs Leigh’s character Blanche DuBois to the bus in question.

The title of the play is of course a metaphor, but there is an actual district of New Orleans called Desire and there did used to be a streetcar serving it.

The role of the sailor meant Kuhn had the distinction of having appeared in the two films for which Leigh won Oscars.

When screen roles dried up Kuhn worked as an aircraft cleaner and eventually ended up in airport management.

He was born Theodore Matthew Michael Kuhn in the town of Waukegan in Illinois in 1932, though the family moved to Hollywood when he was an infant. His father worked in the meat department of the Safeway supermarket chain.

A chance meeting led to his entry into the movies in Change of Heart. He was out with his mother when a stranger approached them and said “Your little boy and my daughter look like they could be twins – 20th Century Fox is having a casting call looking for twins.”

By the time Gone with the Wind came along, Kuhn was beginning to land fairly regular work, appearing in the Humphrey Bogart crime drama King of the Underworld and playing an effete Mexican prince in the historical drama Juarez with Bette Davis.

“I was embarrassed about going to the beauty parlour and sitting under the old permanent wave machine,” he said. “I also had to have a hairpiece attached with spirit gum to the back of my head to make my hair appear longer, fuller, and curlier.”

Kuhn had done a full day’s work on the film SOS Tidal Wave and was none too pleased to have to go to an audition for Gone with the Wind, where he found himself in a room with dozens of other hopefuls.

He recalled: “I started crying and wanted to leave, but Mom said to go up and give my name to the lady at the desk.

"If in ten minutes I hadn’t been called, then we would leave. I went to the lady and said, ‘I’m Mickey Kuhn’. She said: ‘Mickey, we’ve been waiting for you’. And then to the others waiting: ‘Thank you, we’ve cast the part. You may all leave’.”

He had no difficulty in turning on the waterworks when director Victor Fleming told him to imagine that his own mother was dying. He found it much more difficult to stop calling Clark Gable “Uncle Clark” and call him “Uncle Rhett” instead

The epic historical melodrama went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time and won eight Oscars, including best picture.

And Kuhn went on to several dozen more films over the next decade, playing the younger version of Kirk Douglas’s character in the film noir The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and he was Montgomery Clift’s character’s younger self in the classic western Red River with John Wayne.

Kuhn never quite made the transition to adult roles and his career tailed off in the 1950s.

He spent four years in the US Navy as an aircraft technician. Other jobs included barman, Coca-Cola salesman and aircraft cleaner, before ending up in airport management in Washington and Boston.

He recalled one day in the 1970s when he saw Bette Davis at the National Airport (now the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport). He approached the famously unfriendly star, with a polite introduction, assuming she would not remember him.

“Miss Davis, my name is Mickey Kuhn, and I had the honour, privilege and pleasure of working with you in Juarez in 1938 and now I work for American Airlines,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to make your trip more enjoyable?” True to type, she replied “How nice for you. And no, you can’t.”

He had a warmer response from Olivia de Havilland after that belated introduction on her 90th birthday – they kept in touch until her death two years ago at the age of 104.

He attended film festivals and fan conventions and settled in Florida in retirement.

He was married five times, divorced four times, and is survived by his fifth wife Barbara, whom he met at American Airlines, and by two children from his first marriage.

Obituaries

If you would like to submit an obituary (800-1000 words preferred, with jpeg image), or have a suggestion for a subject, contact [email protected]

Subscribe

Subscribe at www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

Scotsman Obituaries: Mickey Kuhn, last surviving credited cast member of Gone with the Wind