Jon Whiteley

Biography

Amazingly talented child star Jon Whiteley was born on February 19, 1945 in Monymusk, Scotland, and put together an enviable, albeit brief, career in 1950s film drama. This precocious talent started things off winningly by earning first prize for verse-speaking at the Aberdeen Music Festival when he was only 6. This led to his indoctrination into films, making a highly auspicious debut but a year later with the suspenser The Stranger in Between (1952), co-starring as a young runaway abducted and subsequently befriended by fugitive Dirk Bogarde. Although this intriguingly offbeat-looking, tousled blond appeared in only five films during his brief reign, he made an award-winning impression. His astonishingly natural performance as Harry in only his second film The Little Kidnappers (1953) so captivated critics that he, along with fellow child co-star Vincent Winter, was awarded an honorary, miniature "Juvenile Oscar" at the Academy Awards ceremony of 1954. In this touching drama, the two boys play orphaned brothers who secretly adopt an abandoned baby after their grandfather's refusal to allow them to keep a pet dog. Other superb portrayals came Jon's way as Fritz Lang's young protagonist John Mohune in Moonfleet (1955) opposite Stewart Granger, and in The Weapon (1956) as a lad who accidentally shoots his friend with a gun used long ago in a murder. Jon also scored in The Spanish Gardener (1956) as the lonely son of a British consul living in Madrid who finds solace with (again) Dirk Bogarde as the title character. Following a tiny spat of TV appearances, his career ended as quickly as it began. After abandoning the limelight, he became a respected art historian at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.