2/9/2016 by
United Artists/Photofest
Then a 12-year-old from the Bronx, he was picked by producer David O. Selznick to play the boy in the adaptation of Mark Twain's 1876 novel.
Tommy Kelly, who starred as the mischievous Missouri boy immortalized by Mark Twain in David O. Selznick's 1938 film The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, has died. He was 90.
Kelly, who was done in Hollywood by the time he turned 25, died Jan. 26 of congestive heart failure at home in Greensboro, N.C., his son, Matt, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The famed producer Selznick handpicked the freckle-faced Kelly, then a 12-year-old student at a Catholic school in the Bronx, to play Tom in the United Artists film. Legend has it that 25,000 youngsters from around the country had auditioned.
Kelly then starred as the title character Billy Peck in Peck's Bad Boy With the Circus (1938) and cried on camera as a youngster with a Confederate band in Selznick's Gone With the Wind(1939).
The son of a fireman, Kelly and his family relocated to Los Angeles in 1936 for the filming ofTom Sawyer. He later appeared in such films as Curtain Call (1940), Military Academy (1940),Irene (1940), Double Date (1941), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), The Beginning or the End(1947), The West Point Story (1950) and The Magnificent Yankee (1950).