JON WHITELEY

(19 February 1945 - 16 May 2020)

Former Scots child actor Jon Whiteley, who has died aged 75, made just a handful of films in the 1950s before abandoning the cinema for a university life. At age six he won a poetry-reading competition which later led to his appearance in Charles Crichton’s Hunted (1952) playing a boy who goes on the run with an escaped prisoner (Dirk Bogarde). In Philip Leacock’s The Kidnappers (1953) he and young Vincent Winter are boys who secretly find an abandoned baby. For their outstanding performances both actors won a special Academy Juvenile Award. Jon Whiteley stars opposite Stewart Granger in Moonfleet (1955), Fritz Lang’s tale of bootlegging pirates, and in Val Guest’s The Weapon (1956) plays a boy who shoots his friend with a gun he has found. In Philip Leacock’s The Spanish Gardener (1956), Whiteley was the lonely son of a diplomat living in Spain where he befriends the title character played by Dirk Bogarde. After a couple of television parts, in Robin Hood and Jericho, Whiteley gave up acting and later became an art historian at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where he catalogued their French drawings and wrote books on French art and musical instruments. In 2009 he was made a chevalier knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters. With his wife, Linda, Jon Whiteley fathered two children.

MICHAEL DARVELL