Shirley Temple (23 April 1928-10 February 2014) was an American actress and diplomat who served as Ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976 and to Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992.
Biography[]
Shirley Temple was born in Santa Monica, California in 1928, and she began her film career at the age of three in 1932, becoming a child film star during the 1930s. She retired from acting during the 1940s and married the conservative businessman Charles Alden Black, and she began a television career in 1958. Temple became active in the California Republican Party and ran for the US House of Representatives in 1967 as a conservative Republican, but she lost in the primary. In 1968, she predicted that Richard Nixon would win the presidential election. From September to December 1969, she served as a delegate to the United Nations, and she went on to serve as ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976, as Chief of Protocol from 1976 to 1977, and as ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992. She openly sympathized with anti-communist dissidents during the Velvet Revolution, personally accompanying Vaclav Havel on his first state visit to the United States. She died in 2014 at the age of 85 from COPD caused by years of smoking.