Jon Whiteley

Amazingly talented child star Jon Whiteley was born Jon James Lamont Whiteley on February 19, 1945 in Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and put together an enviable, albeit brief, career in 1950s film drama. This precocious talent started things off winningly at age six by earning first prize for verse-speaking at the Aberdeen Music Festival when he was only 6. A BBC radio "Children's Hour" producer in Scotland visited the Monymusk Primary School, where his father was headteacher, to record the children's various talents. Little Jon's recitation of Edward Lear's nonsense poem "The Owl and the Pussycat" brought him to the attention of a talent scout, who successfully screen-tested him for a co-starring role in the suspenser The Stranger in Between (1952) in which he plays a young runaway abducted and subsequently befriended by fugitive Dirk Bogarde. Although this intriguingly slim-eyed, offbeat-looking, tousled blond appeared in only five films during his brief reign, he made an award-winning impression. His astonishingly natural performance as Harry in only his second film The Little Kidnappers (1953) so captivated critics that he and fellow child co-star Vincent Winter were awarded an honorary, miniature "Juvenile Oscar" at the Academy Awards ceremony of 1954. In this touching drama, the two boys play orphaned brothers who secretly adopt an abandoned baby after their grandfather's refusal to allow them to keep a pet dog. Other superb portrayals came Jon's way as Fritz Lang's young protagonist John Mohune in Moonfleet (1955) opposite Stewart Granger, and in The Weapon (1956) as a lad who accidentally shoots his friend with a gun used long ago in a murder. Jon also scored in The Spanish Gardener (1956) as the lonely son of a British consul living in Madrid who finds solace with (again) Dirk Bogarde as the title character. Following a tiny spat of TV appearances, his career ended as quickly as it began and he focused on schooling. Jon studied at Inverurie Academy and Atlantic College at St Donat's Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan, earning a degree in modern history from Pembroke College, Oxford, then an MA and a doctorate in the subject after writing a thesis on 19th-century French painting. At the University of Oxford, he began his new career in 1976 as assistant curator of Christ Church Picture Gallery. Two years later, he moved to the Ashmolean Museum, the Oxford University's home of art and archaeology, as an assistant keeper of the Department of Western Art, becoming its senior curator in 1993. A respected art historian, Dr. Whitely authored and co-authored several books on artists including Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Claude Lorrain. He published a book on the Ashmolean's Stringed Instruments in 2009. Married in 1972 to a fellow art historian, Linda Whiteley, the couple had two children, William and Flora. He was made a chevalier (knight) of the French Order of Arts and Letters in May, 2009. Jon died at age 75 on May 16, 2020, in Oxford.