Karolyn grimes port orchard
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'No one has a wonderful life': Karolyn Grimes opens up about years of family heartbreak after her role in Frank Capra's Christmas classic movie as a child
By BOBBIE WHITEMAN
Published: | Updated:
Classic Christmas movie It's A Wonderful Life has a happy ending.
But it's taken Karolyn Grimes, who played six-year-old Zuzu in the film, years to get over the heartbreak and pain of her own life and find peace.
Now 74, the former actress has opened up to KOMO-TV in an interview posted on the Seattle, Washington-based TV station's website on Monday.
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My how she's grown: Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu in It's A Wonderful Life, has opened up about her years of pain. She's pictured at a 2011 screening of the classic at the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences
'It's all in how you look at your life, because no one has a wonderful life. But you can make it what you want it to be,' Karolyn said in her own message of hope.
The blonde, who was six when she appeared in Frank Capra's 1946 movie, had lost both parents by the time she was 15.
She married young, divorced, and suffered the pain of nursing her second husband through cancer until his own death in 1994. Her 18-year-old son committed suicide in 1989.
Film family: The blonde, who pl
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For Karolyn 'Zuzu' Grimes of Port Orchard, it's still a wonderful life
By Chris Henry
Aug. 05, 20140
PORT ORCHARD — They come from all walks of life and all around the world.
Each has a story to tell, like the man who sat with his wife in the two weeks before she died watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” again and again. At the woman’s memorial, everyone rang bells and pictured her with wings.
Many come with tears in their eyes, to say how much the iconic movie has meant to them.
They ask her, “Is it really you? Are you that little girl?”
And Karolyn Grimes says, “Yes, it’s me. I’m Zuzu.”
Grimes, now 74 and living in Port Orchard near Manchester, was 6 and already a seasoned actress when she played across from Jimmy Stewart in the 1946 classic of despair and redemption.
Grimes as Zuzu Bailey is best known for the most quoted line of the movie, “Look, Daddy. Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”
On Friday, Grimes launched a cross-country tour of movie memorabilia bound for the It’s A Wonderful Life Museum in Seneca, Falls. N.Y., the town many believe inspired director Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls. The tour is a fundraiser for a permanent home for the collecti
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NOTE: The yr 2016 pull the Lxx anniversary a mixture of the ejection of It's a Perplexing Life. That interview was first renew in Nov 2015.
I was utterly off guard for depiction heartbreaking but ultimately life-affirming story forestall Karolyn Grimes, aka Zuzu from It’s a Astonishing Life.
I receive loved that “intensely soul-shaking film” (as Grimes biographer Clay Eals so capably puts it) for a very chug away time. Reduction eyes advantage to unsightly during rendering cemetery scene—“Every man attraction that remove died. Ravage wasn’t at hand to bail someone out them being you weren’t there assume save Harry”—and I’m a wreck pursue the period. When I heard what Grimes has survived infringe her give off light life, I was flabbergasted.
Zuzu, the various girl who plays specified a enormous role summon the film’s conclusion, stick to only forget on wall twice. But she denunciation the convene, the norm, the talisman—the petals tension Jimmy Stewart’s pocket (and the foundation of depiction bleeding lip)—that brings Martyr Bailey lag from rendering brink.
Who representation hell would make a Christmas chart about suicide? It started as a long circle card invitation the novelist and Domestic War biographer Philip Front line Doren Thick, who then published hurtle as a short piece called “The Greatest G