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Hollywood child actor who was one of the last surviving performers from the silent film era

Lassie Lou Ahern, who has died aged 97, enjoyed a substantial career as a child actor in 1920s Hollywood, and was one of the last surviving performers from the silent film era.

She made her debut aged three, in Hal Roach’s first full-length movie, an adaptation of The Call of the Wild (1923), and soon was regularly cast in Charley Chase comedies and as the object of rescue in the popular serials of Helen Holmes. In pictures such as Webs of Steel (1925), Ahern and Holmes carried out their own dangerous stunt work. She appeared in productions by independent producers (The Dark Angel for Samuel Goldwyn, Hell’s Highroad for Cecil B DeMille, Robes of Sin for William Russell, all in 1925), and features at major studios (John Ford’s now lost film Thank You and Excuse Me starring Norma Shearer,...

Lassie Lou Ahern, the versatile child actress who appeared in the Our Gang comedy shorts and played a boy in the Universal Pictures silent epic Uncle Tom's Cabin, has died. She was 97.

Ahern, who was a protégé of the American icon Will Rogers and years later taught dance to the likes of Renee Zellweger, died Thursday in Prescott, Arizona, of complications related to the flu, film preservationist Jeffrey Crouse told The Hollywood Reporter.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927), a film adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, took almost two years to make on location alongside the Mississippi River and...