Jacquie Lynn, 73; Acted in Comedies as a Child

Her Hollywood career was brief--it began when she was 3 and ended before she was 5--but Jacquelyn Woll worked with screen greats Laurel and Hardy, Marie Dressler and Little Rascal Spanky MacFarland.

Billed as Jacquie Lynn, she made her film debut in the Laurel and Hardy feature “Pack Up Your Troubles,” appearing in a memorable scene in which she reads “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” to a sleepy Laurel.

Woll, who was rediscovered by Laurel and Hardy fans a decade ago after a lifetime out of the public eye, died of a heart attack March 21 at her home in Granada Hills. She was 73.

Born Jacquelyn Dufton in Kent County, England, in 1928, she came to the United States with her widowed mother--her father, a British naval officer, had died of pneumonia--at age 2 and was raised in Brentwood.

Cowboy star Tim McCoy, a family friend, suggested to Jacquelyn’s mother that she take her cherub-faced blond daughter to see producer Hal Roach.

Roach, who preferred natural rather than trained child actors, cast her in the Laurel and Hardy film and two Our Gang comedies, including “Free Wheeling,” in which she is a passenger in the gang’s mule-pulled taxi wagon and says, “Spanky, don’t you think we’re going rather faw-st?”

On loan to MGM, she appeared in “The Strange Love of Molly Luvain” with Ann Dvorak and “Prosperity” with Dressler and Polly Moran.

But when Jacquie Lynn’s new stepfather asked more for her services than the studio was willing to pay, her Hollywood career came to an abrupt end.

She later attended UCLA but left to get married before graduating.

Over the years, her Hollywood days were a pleasant childhood memory--she remembered Laurel’s sweet smile and had a big crush on child actor Dickie Moore.

But for Christmas 1991, her son gave her a videotape copy of “Pack Up Your Troubles” that had a picture of her on the cover in her pajamas sitting with the two men she had called Uncle Stan and Uncle Ollie.

The tape included old home movies of Woll playing with Laurel’s daughter Lois, and in her narration Lois Laurel said Laurel and Hardy and Little Rascals fans were looking for Jacquie Lynn.

“Those pictures happened so long ago; I had no idea anyone was interested. It comes as a big shock,” Woll said in Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann’s “The Little Rascals: The Life and Time of Our Gang.”

She attended two conventions of the Laurel and Hardy appreciation society, the Sons of the Desert.

“People from the Laurel and Hardy group were always so pleasant and nice to her,” said Woll’s husband, Martin, a retired banker. “We heard from them ever since; they always sent her Christmas cards.”

But after two Laurel and Hardy conventions, his wife had had enough.

“She said, ‘You know, I’ve told them everything I know at the first two,’” Martin Woll said. And though she agreed to attend the next convention in Memphis in July, Woll said, “My wife didn’t want to be in the limelight.”

In addition to her husband of 52 years, Woll is survived by her daughter, Marcia Burnham of Benecia, Calif.; sons Martin Jr. of Chatsworth, Michael of Ojai and Peter of Newhall; and five grandchildren.