Mickey Daniels
Signed by Hal Roach at seven. Freckles, and a laugh the studio wrote into the scripts.
Richard Daniels Jr., billed as Mickey Daniels, was signed by Hal Roach in 1921 and became one of the regulars of the silent Our Gang comedies alongside Joe Cobb, Jackie Condon, Jackie Davis, Mary Kornman and Ernie Morrison.
The silent Our Gang is a different thing from the Little Rascals most people picture. The sound shorts with Spanky and Alfalfa came later and are the ones that ran on television for decades. The Pathé silents that Daniels worked in are earlier, rougher and much less seen.
He aged out, as every child in the series did, and the industry had nothing much for him afterwards. He died in 1970.
This file holds a Roach studio still from the silent run. Publicity photographs of the Our Gang children were produced in quantity because the series was sold to exhibitors on the faces of its cast.
Roach tried to hold on to him. Between 1930 and 1932 the studio put Daniels and Mary Kornman, now in their teens, into a series called The Boy Friends, a sound-era attempt to age the Our Gang formula up into college comedy. It ran two seasons and stopped. In 1933 the two of them came back to the old series for a single joke: in Fish Hooky they play the grown-ups, Daniels as a truant officer chasing the new gang. His last screen credit was Miss Polly in 1941. He was twenty seven.
What he did afterwards is better documented than it is for most former child actors, because it was ordinary. He worked in construction engineering through the 1950s and 1960s. From 1967 he drove for Red Top Taxi in San Diego. He died there on August 20, 1970, of cirrhosis, aged fifty five, and was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. The laugh that Roach's writers built gags around in 1924 is the thing people still ask about. It is on film in the surviving Pathé shorts, and the shorts are silent.
Facts on this file are checked against the Wikipedia article Mickey Daniels. The wording is ours. Nothing about the photograph is asserted beyond the credit the file itself carries, and that credit is usually a studio rather than a person: stills departments were staff jobs and the photographer's name went unrecorded. Confident attributions in the trade are mostly inherited guesses.
About Mickey Daniels
What happened to Mickey Daniels after Our Gang
He left the series in 1926 with Thundering Fleas, came back for Roach's teenage series The Boy Friends from 1930 to 1932, and took small parts until Miss Polly in 1941. After 1951 he quit films altogether and worked in construction engineering. His last job was driving a cab for Red Top Taxi in San Diego, from 1967 until his death in 1970. Nobody in the industry noticed the death at the time.
How did Mickey Daniels die
Cirrhosis of the liver, attributed to years of heavy drinking, on August 20, 1970, in San Diego. He was fifty five. He had been driving a taxi for three years by then and had no contact with the studios. Burial was at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, the same cemetery as several other Roach performers. The death is sometimes listed as evidence for a curse on the series. It was alcoholism, which is common.
Is the Our Gang curse real
The list usually cited runs Carl Switzer, shot in 1959 at thirty one, Scotty Beckett, dead at thirty eight, Norman Chaney at twenty one, Billy Laughlin at sixteen. Those deaths happened. What does not hold up is the pattern: when the whole roster of major cast members is counted, the mortality is not unusual, and Snopes went through the exercise and said so. Daniels made it to fifty five. The series used dozens of children across 220 shorts between 1922 and 1944, and most of them lived unremarkable lengths.
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