Appearances

Title	Role	Year	Approx. Age
All Fall Down	Clinton Willart	1962	20
To Catch a Butterfly - The Sorcerer's Apprentice	Hugo	1962	20
Blue Denim	Arthur Bartley	1959	17
Missouri Traveler	Brian Turner	1958	16
Good Bye, My Lady	Skeeter	1956	14
Shane	Joey Starrett	1953	11
The Member of the Wedding	John Henry	1952	10

Andre Brandon De Wilde (pronounced duh-WIL-duh) was the son of a stage-manager father and actress mother. He made his stage debut at age seven in 492 performances of the Broadway hit, "The Member of the Wedding." He was the first child actor to win the Donaldson Award and went on to repeat his role in the film version directed by Fred Zinnemann in 1952.

Movie fame came fast as the blonde, blue-eyed Joey who idolizes the strange gunman Alan Ladd in Shane (1953). He stole the picture and was rewarded with an Oscar nomination the following year, the first of two he was to receive before the age of twenty-one.

He starred in his own television series Jamie during 1953-54 and made his mark as a screen adolescent during the 1960s, playing younger brother to Warren Beatty in All Fall Down (1962) and to Paul Newman in Hud (1963) (His second Academy Award nomination).

Brandon De Wilde was critically injured in a traffic accident in the Denver suburb of Lakewood on the evening of July 6, 1972, while en route to perform in the play, "Butterflies Are Free". Swerving to avoid another vehicle, he struck a construction trailer parked on the side of the road, and was pinned under the wreckage of his motorcycle for some time before being taken to Denver General Hospital. He died four hours later. He was only thirty years old.

Close friend (and sometimes singing partner) country-western legend Gram Parsons immortalized De Wilde's tragic death in Parsons' and Emmylou Harris's song "In My Hour of Darkness:"

Once I knew a young man went driving through the night.
Miles and miles without a word, with just his high-beam lights.
Who'd have ever thought they'd build such a deadly Denver bend.
To be so strong, to take as long as it would till the end.