Cora Susan Collins was born on April 19, 1927, in
Beckley, West Virginia. She later moved to
Los Angeles,
California, along with her mother and older sister. Collins made her acting debut in
The Unexpected Father in 1932 at the age of five. She starred opposite
Slim Summerville and
ZaSu Pitts, playing Summerville's adoptive daughter. She appeared in the American romantic drama ''
Smilin' Through'' (1932), starred
Norma Shearer,
Fredric March, and
Leslie Howard. It was a remake of a silent film of the same name made a decade earlier, and Collins had a minor role as Shearer's character Kathleen Wayne as a young girl. ''Smilin' Through'' was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Picture for 1932, but did not win. In total, Collins appeared in five motion pictures in 1932, mainly as a supporting cast member. The films were made by different studios, such as
MGM,
Paramount, and
Universal. In 1933, Collins' career continued to consist mostly of playing either the leading lady's daughter, or the leading lady herself in a flashback scene. For instance in
Torch Singer, she played
Claudette Colbert's daughter Sally Trent, age five. (Because both mother and daughter had the same name in the film, she is often mistakenly identified as playing Colbert as a child, but Colbert’s character never appears as a child in the film.) Another example is when she was cast as
Queen Christina as a child in the MGM biographical film
of the same name starring
Greta Garbo.
Queen Christina was well-received by film critics at the time. She had a small part as the daughter of a farmer in
The Prizefighter and the Lady, for which its main writer
Frances Marion was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story. In 1934, Collins had a supporting role in the
horror film Black Moon. She featured in
Colleen Moore's last film,
The Scarlet Letter. She was cast as
William Powell and
Myrna Loy's characters' daughter Dorothy in
Evelyn Prentice, which despite its leads was not part of
The Thin Man franchise. In
The World Accuses she had a rare billing in the movie poster. Produced by the small studio
Chesterfield Pictures, the film also features fellow child actor
Dickie Moore, whom she would appear with later that year in
Little Men. In the 1980s, Moore interviewed her among many other child actors for his book ''Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: But Don't Have Sex Or Take the Car''. She played a princess in
John Farrow's 21-minute MGM short
The Spectacle Maker. It was Farrow's directorial debut and was filmed in full
three-strip Technicolor. Collins' reported salary in 1934 was $250 per week (). Collins was initially cast as Becky Thatcher in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), but her role was changed to Amy Lawrence because she was considered to be too tall for
Tommy Kelly. A rare leading role for Collins was in the 1945
Columbia Pictures drama
Youth on Trial, in which she played the juvenile delinquent daughter of a court judge. Her last movie appearance was in 1945, after which she retired from show business at the age of 18. ==Personal life and death==