Jane Withers, child actress who turned TV commercial star, dead at 95

Jane Withers, the former child actor who bedeviled Shirley Temple on the screen and went on to star in a series of B movies that made her a box-office champion, has died, her daughter said. She was 95.

After a series of minor roles as a child actress, Withers was cast by Twentieth Century-Fox in the 1934 "Bright Eyes," as the nemesis of lovable Temple, then Hollywood’s most popular star. "I had to play the meanest, creepiest little girl that God ever put on this planet," Withers recalled in 2000. "I ran over Shirley with a tricycle, and a baby buggy. And I thought, ‘Oh dear, everybody’s going to hate me forever because I was so creepy mean to Shirley Temple!‘ " It didn’t turn out that way. Critics claimed that she stole the picture from Shirley. Children wrote fan letters admiring what she did to Shirley "because she’s so perfect."