Dick Moore, a public relations executive who was known as Dickie when he was a Hollywood child star, playing the movies' first talking Oliver Twist and later giving Shirley Temple what was widely publicized as her first on-screen kiss, died on Monday in Connecticut. He was 89.
Helaine Feldman, who works for his company, Dick Moore & Associates, confirmed the death but said she was not sure where it had occurred. Mr. Moore lived in Wilton, Conn.
Mr. Moore was not yet a year old and evidently cute as a button when he made his movie debut in the 1927 silent feature "The Beloved Rogue," which starred John Barrymore as the 15th-century French poet and gadabout François Villon. Young Dickie, uncredited, played Villon as an infant.
He very quickly became a busy youngster, appearing in dozens of features and short films, many before he turned 12, including "Blonde Venus" (1932), in which he played Marlene Dietrich's son, and "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936), in which he played a boy saved from rabies by Paul Muni. In 1932-33, he appeared regularly in "Our Gang" shorts (the series was known as "The Little Rascals" when the films were shown on television). He was 6 when he played the title role in Hollywood's first sound adaptation of Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist" (1933).
Mr. Moore claimed that the much-ballyhooed kiss he gave Shirley Temple in "Miss Annie Rooney" (1942) - he was 16, she was 14 - was his first kiss on screen or off (though Temple, as she admitted in her autobiography, couldn't say the same - and she had actually been kissed on screen at least once before).