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The inspiration for Little Orphan Annie?


They say you should learn something every day.

Today, I found mention of a silent movie called Little Orphant Annie from 1918 which had footage of poet James Witcomb Riley (1849-1916) - certainly one of the earliest born persons to appear in a fictional film.

Mary Alice "Allie" Smith, (b. 1850) was a orphaned girl who lived with Riley's father and family as a part servant and part family member, and told stories to the other children in the evening when work was done.

When Riley gew up he wrote a famous poem about her and the stories she would tell, at first called "The Elf Child", and later called "Little Orphant Allie", which a typograpical error turned into "Little orphant Anne".

As one of his most well known poems, it served as the inspiration for the comic strip Little Orphan Annie which itself inspired a Broadway musical, several films, and many radio and television programs.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Orphant_Annie

The comic strip Little Orphan Annie ran from 1924 to 2010.

The strip took its name from the 1885 poem "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley, and it made its debut on August 5, 1924, in the New York Daily News.


So possibly every production of Annie is remotely based on Mary Alice "Allie" Smith.

However, it is also written that:

Gray reported in 1952 that Annie's origin lay in a chance meeting he had with a ragamuffin while wandering the streets of Chicago looking for cartooning ideas. "I talked to this little kid and liked her right away", Gray said. "She had common sense, knew how to take care of herself. She had to. Her name was Annie. At the time some 40 strips were using boys as the main characters; only three were using girls. I chose Annie for mine, and made her an orphan, so she'd have no family, no tangling alliances, but freedom to go where she pleased."[1]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Orphan_Annie#Publication_history

So that makes it seem like the main inspiration for Little Orphan Annie was a Chicago girl named Annie in 1924.

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