Gone with the Wind child actress dies

2010-09-03 20:14

Fort Bragg - Cammie King Conlon, the former child actress who portrayed the doomed daughter of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, has died at the age of 76.

She died of lung cancer on Wednesday at her Fort Bragg home on California's north coast, said friend Bruce Lewis. Her son, Matthew Ned Conlon, was by her side.

Conlon was picked to play the small, but pivotal role of Bonnie Blue Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic at age 4. Her character's death in a fall from a pony irrevocably damages Rhett and Scarlett's tumultuous marriage.

Conlon also voiced the young doe Faline in Walt Disney's Bambi three years later. It would be her final film role.

"My mother decided she wanted me to have a normal childhood," she wrote on her blog, which talked about her brief career and a memoir she published last year on her Gone With the Wind experience. She often joked with interviewers that she had "peaked at 5".

The Los Angeles native graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in communications and spent two years editing California Pictorial magazine. She moved to Mendocino County 30 years ago, working as director of the Kelly House museum and as a publicist for the Mendocino Coast Chamber of Commerce and the Little River Inn.

Conlon stayed in touch with her Gone With the Wind family. On Sunday night, she took a call from Olivia de Havilland, who played Scarlett's sweet-hearted nemesis Melanie in the film, her son said.

"It's amazing because she is so much more than Bonnie Blue Butler, but ... that is what she is remembered for, and it's a pretty great thing to be remembered for," Matthew Conlon said. "Nobody told it better than Mom - when you debut in Gone with the Wind, it's downhill."

- AP