George Winslow was a child actor who was born in Los Angeles in 1946. He made his debut in 1952 in “Room For One More”. His films include two with Marilyn Monroe, “Monkey Business” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. His other films include “The Rocket Man” and “Artists and Models” with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He died in 2015.
“Telegraph” obituary:
George Winslow has died aged 69, was a Hollywood child actor with a dead-pan stare and “Buster Brown” haircut who appeared in several feature films of the 1950s, most notably Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953), in which he played Marilyn Monroe’s precocious young admirer.
Winslow, whose real name was George Wentzlaff and who acquired the nickname “Foghorn” owing to a deep voice which belied his youthful appearance, was seven when he played the part of the pint-sized millionaire Henry Spofford III in Howard Hawks’s perennially popular musical comedy. In one of the funniest scenes in the film Marilyn Monroe, as the gold-digging blonde bombshell Lorelei Lee, is seen trying to squeeze her capacious behind through a porthole, assisted by Winslow, who explains there are two reasons why he has agreed to help: “The first is, I’m too young to be sent to jail. The second is, you’ve got a lot of animal magnetism.’’
In reality, Winslow recalled that of the two leading actresses in the film, he preferred Marilyn’s co-star, Jane Russell, who was willing to play with him when he got bored during shooting. By the age of 12 Winslow’s voice had broken – upwards – and his Hollywood career was over.
He was born on May 3 1946 in Los Angeles, and made his first public appearance aged six on Art Linkletter’s People are Funny radio show, where his bass voice and comic timing made him a hit with listeners. Spotted by Cary Grant, he made his film debut in 1952, co-starring with Grant and Betsy Drake in Norman Taurog’s Room for One More, about a couple with three children who foster two troubled orphans, one played by Winslow.
He appeared with Grant again later the same year as “Little Indian” in Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (co-starring Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe), and went on to win his only starring role as Gus Jennings, Richard Widmark’s brattish son in Robert Parrish’s My Pal Gus (1952), which won him a Critic’s Award.
After Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, he co-starred in Henry Levin’s Mister Scoutmaster (1953) as a boy scout from the wrong side of the tracks who enjoys verbal jousts with the snobbish television star turned scoutmaster (Clifton Webb), and in Oscar Rudolph’s low-budget comedy The Rocket Man (1954), Winslow played a boy with a ray gun that compels anyone caught in its beam to tell the truth. That and later films such as Artists and Models (1955), An Affair to Remember (1957), and Rock, Pretty Baby (1956) only proved that the appeal of the cute little boy with the big voice was beginning to fade. After making his last screen appearance in Charles F Haas’s Western, Wild Heritage (1958), George Winslow retired from show business, re-adopted his birth name and vanished into anonymity.
After leaving school, he moved to Oregon, where he attended Lewis & Clark College. He served in the Navy during the Vietnam war, then returned to California, where he worked for the US postal service in Sonoma County until his retirement .
He never married, but shared his home with approximately 25 cats.
