'Gone With the Wind' child actress dies at 76

LOS ANGELES -- Cammie King Conlon, who jokingly lamented that she was famous for an experience she barely remembered, portraying Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler's ill-fated young daughter in the film "Gone With the Wind," has died. She was 76.

Conlon, whose brief movie-acting career included voicing the fawn Faline in "Bambi," died Wednesday of cancer at her home in Fort Bragg, Calif., said Bruce Lewis, a friend.

At 4, she was cast as Bonnie Blue Butler for her resemblance to her film-screen parents -- Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable -- but her memories of making the epic 1939 Civil War saga were vague, more like "snapshots," she often said.

She had adored the black Shetland pony that she rode and recalled how perplexed she was when she spotted what looked like a little girl, dressed exactly as she was, smoking a cigarette on the set.

The actor was an adult male, a little person who was her stunt double when Bonnie Blue falls from her pony, which causes her death and a pivotal plot point -- Rhett's profound depression.

In the death scene that followed, she couldn't keep her eyelids from fluttering and wore a death mask when Gable picked her up. She was so frightened when the mask was being made, her tears left visible imprints on it, Conlon later said.

She also recalled how director Victor Fleming had lectured her to remember her lines.

He said, "Cammie, I have a daughter your age and all these men here have families, too, that depend on them to work here. They need to feed those children. But if you don't say your lines, they can't work,'" she said in 1998.

Conlon -- billed as Cammie King in the movie -- said she never flubbed another line.

She fondly referred to Gable as a "father figure" who looked out for her.

"If they were doing a lot of takes of a certain scene, he would say, 'Come on, fellows. Let's wrap it up -- the baby is tired,'" she said.

As an adult, she appeared regularly with other actors from "Gone With the Wind" at events honoring the movie.

Of her part in one of the best films of all time, Conlon liked to say: "I peaked at age 5."