Mickey Kuhn Dies: ‘Gone With the Wind’ Child Actor Was 90
Former child actor Mickey Kuhn, best known for starring in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, has died. He was 90.
According to his wife, Barbara (via The Hollywood Reporter), Kuhn passed away in a hospice facility in Naples, Florida, on Sunday, November 20. He was in good health until recently, she said.
Kuhn was the last surviving cast member of Gone with the Wind, in which he played Beau Wilkes, the son of Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard’s characters. He was just six years old when he took on the role and went on to appear in Dick Tracey (1945), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), John Wayne’s Red River (1948), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), where he reunited with Vivien Leigh, 12 years after they first worked together in Gone with the Wind.
He also starred in the CBS television anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1956, the same year he featured in his final film, Away All Boats. After leaving the entertainment industry, Kuhn worked for American Airlines from 1965 to 1995 and at the Boston airport in administrative positions until his retirement.
Speaking to The Washington Post in 2014, Kuhn open up about working on Gone With The Wind and how he kept messing up his lines in a scene with Clark Gable. “My line was, ‘Hello, Uncle Rhett,’” he recalled. “I kept saying, ‘Hello, Uncle Clark.’”
His other credits include Magic Town (1947), Broken Arrow (1950), I Want a Divorce (1940), One Foot in Heaven (1941), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), The Searching Wind (1946), High Conquest (1947), and Scene of the Crime (1949).
He is survived by his wife Barbara, his son Mick (and his wife, Jolene), daughter Patricia, and granddaughter Samantha.
