Shirley Temple: Hollywood pays tribute to 'one of a kind' child star

Shirley Temple became a child star at age three and was popular for her cherubic looks and tap-dancing. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Whoopi Goldberg and Mia Farrow were among the Hollywood stars who paid tribute to the former child star Shirley Temple, who has died aged 85.

On Tuesday Farrow said Temple, still held as one of the most famous child stars of all time, "raised the spirits of a nation during the Great Depression", while Goldberg identified her as "one of a kind".

Temple began her singular career aged three, finding early success with films including Curly Top, Heidi and Bright Eyes, which featured one of Temple's best known performances, a rendition of Richard A Whiting and Sidney Clare's On the Good Ship Lollipop.

Temple reached the height of her popularity on screen during the 1930s. Her roles as a cherubic tomboy, topped by dimples and ringlets, but with a mean line in tap-dancing, were popular with audiences and the young actor was credited with saving the depression-hit Fox Studios. In 1936, as seven-year-old she was earning up to $50,000 ($800,000 today).

Her popularity waned in the late 1940s as she headed towards adolescence. When she left the film business in 1950 she had appeared in 44 features. She returned briefly to showbusiness in the late 1950s with a children's television series, Shirley Temple's Storybook and The Shirley Temple Show, a short-running variety show that was cancelled in 1961.

But Temple avoided the fate of many child stars who struggle with early fame and negotiated a successful new role in international politics.

She became US representative to the UN general assembly during late 1969 and was later US ambassador to Ghana and then Czechoslovakia

She became active in politics in the late 1960s, taking the name Shirley Temple Black, after marrying the US Navy veteran Charles Alden Black. She sided with the Republican party in an unsuccessful bid to join the Californian congress in 1967, but was beaten by Pete McCloskey, a fellow Republican who was an opponent of the Vietnam war, which Temple supported.

In 1972 she held a press conference in the hospital room where she'd recently before had a cancerous left breast removed. Her forthright approach to this mastectomy, and her call urging women who discovered lumps not to "sit home and be afraid", was credited with great improving communication and awareness about the disease.

Temple was married twice – to John Agar in 1945 (when she was 17) and to Black in 1950. Temple and Agar had a daughter, Linda, before their divorce in 1949. She married Black the next year.

They were married for 54 years until Black's death in 2005. They had a son in 1952 and a daughter, Lori, in 1954, who grew up to be the one-time bass player with the American punk band The Melvins.