Bobby Breen obituary

Bobby Breen, who has died aged 87, belongs on the long list of Hollywood child stars whose careers were terminated or blunted by adolescence. It was particularly poignant for the curly-haired, cherubic Breen because his fame resided mainly in his high, prepubescent singing voice. Rainbow on the River (1936) was perhaps his best-known film, the title song also becoming his greatest hit on Decca records.

From the age of eight to 11, from 1936 to 1939, Breen, under contract to RKO Pictures, starred in eight hit movies, almost rivalling Shirley Temple and Freddie Bartholomew in popularity. The modest semi-musicals were cleverly constructed vehicles that highlighted his clear, boy soprano tones and natural acting ability. Although all the characters he played had one parent or were orphans, Breen was a cheerful, spunky child, who avoided the saccharine elements usual in such portrayals (like, for example, those of Temple). Luckily, when his voice broke, he was not. He had made enough money from films to be able to explore other avenues, while staying in show business.

He was born Isadore Borsuk in Montreal, the son of Hyman and Rebecca, poor Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Soon after, the family, including his three older sisters, moved to Toronto. His sister Susan, a music student, noticed the boy’s singing talent as early as the age of three. After lessons with her music teacher, he began to sing in public, winning prizes at competitions. By the age of six, little Isadore, who had become Bobby Breen, was singing in shows around the US. In New York, he enrolled in the Professional Children’s School and got the part of Bob Hope’s newsboy son in the Broadway musical Say When (1934).

Finally landing in Hollywood, he appeared regularly on Eddie Cantor’s weekly radio show. This led to the film producer Sol Lesser offering him the starring role in Let’s Sing Again (1936). In it, Breen joins a travelling circus run by an ex-operatic tenor (an Italian stereotype played by Henry Armetta), who hides the boy. One scene has Breen singing his benefactor to sleep with a lullaby, which leads to his being found by the father he thought dead.

His debut film set the formula for all Breen’s subsequent movies. Thus: Bobby is having problems at home or school so he runs away and is befriended and helped by an older man who falls for his personality and singing voice – a plot that could only be devised in more innocent times.

The plots gave Breen time to burst into song at many appropriate moments, mostly in natural rather than theatrical settings. The songs were a mixture of operetta and operatic arias, and modern romantic ballads, though Breen was able to swing a tune from time to time.

In Rainbow on the River, his second movie, Breen played a New Orleans boy raised by a former slave (Louise Beavers) after his parents died in the civil war, who has to move in with his stuffy Yankee relatives in New York. According to the New York Times review, “Master Breen is a clever little performer who can carry anything from Schubert’s Ave Maria to Stephen Foster’s Old Folks at Home with a bell-like voice which demands your respect. He also plunks a banjo, smiles winningly ... and holds the women of the audience in the palm of his hand from the moment he takes the screen.”

Breen inspires an operetta composer played by Basil Rathbone in Make a Wish (1937). In Hawaii Calls (1938), Breen stows away on a ship from San Francisco to Honolulu, where he gets to sing a bunch of Hawaiian melodies while on the run. Despite having put on inches in height and breadth, Breen’s voice remained high in Breaking the Ice (1938) and Fisherman’s Wharf (1939).

As an orphan boy who has inherited a plantation, including its slaves, in the pre-civil war south in Way Down South (1939), Breen got to sing, in voice like that of a grown woman, a few negro spirituals. Ironically, the screenplay, which seemed to suggest that slaves were happy under benevolent white owners, was written by the African-American actor Clarence Muse and Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

The ageing 11-year-old Breen’s last film as a boy soprano was Escape to Paradise (1939), set in a fictional Latin American state where he is a motorcycle taxi driver, complete with local accent.

Breen’s final screen appearance was in a non-singing tongue-in-cheek cameo as himself in Johnny Doughboy (1942), alongside other former child stars such as Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer and George “Spanky” McFarland from the Our Gang shorts.

After having joined the army during the second world war, he returned to New York, where he took singing lessons to allow him to adapt to his adult tenor voice. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as a singer in nightclubs and in stock theatre.

“They expect me to come on stage still wearing short pants,” Breen later remarked. “It takes a lot of work out there to make them believe I’m grown up. They resent it somehow. It’s something I have to fight every single performance.”

He also recorded briefly for the Motown record label, singing on two singles, before it was realised that he did not have the type of voice that suited Motown. But he was not forgotten. Breen’s face appeared on the cover of the 1967 Beatles album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band between George Harrison and Marlene Dietrich. “How they chose me, or where they got the picture, I have no idea,” Breen said.

Since the 1970s, he and his wife, Audre (nee Scharf), had lived in Florida, where they set up a successful theatrical agency. Audre died three days before Bobby. He had three sons, Hunter, Ron and Paul.