Her story begins thus: Shirley Temple was born in 1928 in Santa Monica, CA, the third child of George and Gertrude Temple. Her father was a banker, and her mother was a homemaker. It was, by all accounts, a happy household, and Shirley was a charming child. In 1931, when she was three years old, Gertrude signed her up in a dance school. Temple would eventually be noticed there by a casting director from Educational Pictures, who placed her in a series of their short films called Baby Burlesk. They are bizarre, to say the least. The movies weren’t educational in the least, but they did have the strange proposition of toddlers playing adult roles in westerns, mysteries, etc. They are unsettling at best when viewed now, but I guess people thought these were cute back then. The sets were not warm and loving environments, either—Temple said that kids who acted up during filming were forced to sit on a block of ice in a dark room. Yikes.