Appearances

Title	Role	Year	Approx. Age
They Shall Have Music	Willie	1939	14
Peck's Bad Boy With The Circus	Bill Peck	1938	13
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1938	Tom Sawyer	1938	13

Obituary: Died January 26, 2016
Tommy Kelly, who starred as the mischievous Missouri boy immortalized by Mark Twain in David O. Selznick?s 1938 film The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, has died. He was 90.

Kelly, who was done in Hollywood by the time he turned 25, died Jan. 26 of congestive heart failure at home in Greensboro, N.C., his son, Matt, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The famed producer Selznick handpicked the freckle-faced Kelly, then a 12-year-old student at a Catholic school in the Bronx, to play Tom in the United Artists film. Legend has it that 25,000 youngsters from around the country had auditioned.

Kelly then starred as the title character Billy Peck in Peck?s Bad Boy With the Circus (1938) and cried on camera as a youngster with a Confederate band in Selznick?s Gone With the Wind (1939).

The son of a fireman, Kelly and his family relocated to Los Angeles in 1936 for the filming of Tom Sawyer. He later appeared in such films as Curtain Call (1940), Military Academy (1940), Irene (1940), Double Date (1941), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), The Beginning or the End (1947), The West Point Story (1950) and The Magnificent Yankee (1950).

Kelly enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Europe during World War II. After his Hollywood days, he earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State and was a high school teacher and counselor in Culver City and an administrator in the Orange County school system.

He then accepted an assignment as a Peace Corps administrator in Monrovia, Liberia, and served as superintendent of international schools in Liberia and Venezuela. He returned to the States and worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.

Survivors include his wife of 67 years, Susie; children Ann, Matt (and wife Kathy), Eileen (and husband Wally), Kevin (and wife Patricia), Mark (and wife Gail) and Paul (and wife Teresa); 12 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Original Posting...
In our endeavor to find out more about Tommy Kelly, we have received the following information: Posted 2/25/13 "Tom Kelly was a Deputy Peace Corps director in Liberia, West Africa in the late 60s. He then became the Principal of the American grammar/high school there where he remained some years. He remains married to Sue Kelly, the mother of his six children, He was still alive, but in poor health, when last I heard news of him @ 18 mos ago."

Our original post about Kelly:
A tough actor to find information about... supposedly Tommy kelly was reluctant to take an interview or discuss his film career. His whereabouts is unknown, nor do we know if he is still alive.

What we do know is that he is one of thirteen children born to a poor Irish family in the Bronx in 1925. For the role of Tom Sawyer he was selected out of 25,000 kids interviewed for the part. Freckled Tommy Kelly had three years of fame, but the parts grew less rewarding and after The Magnificent Yankee (1950) he faded into obscurity.

Most know him for his famous role in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), but what may not be known is that Tommy also had a background part in Gone with the Wind (1939) and a minor role in They Shall Have Music (1939). His other most noted role is as Peck in Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus (1938). If you look closely you may catch him as a young adult in the 1950 war film Battleground, along with other former child actors: Scotty Beckett (Our Gang), Tommy Noonan, Tommy Bond (Our Gang) and Dickie Jones.