I was dismayed and saddened by the passing of Claude Jarman Jr. last week. He lived a long, happy and memorable life, and he left this world peacefully in his sleep at the age of 90. But that’s not really much of a comfort; irrational as it may be, there are always people whom you subconsciously nominate to live forever, and Claude Jarman was one of those.

Partly, for me, that feeling comes from having met and spent time with this gracious gentleman. I owe this privilege to my friend Richard Glazier, the noted concert pianist and documentary filmmaker. As part of his ongoing project to interview veterans of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Richard invited me in March 2017 to accompany him to visit Mr. Jarman in his hillside home in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, where Richard recorded our conversation with him about his life and career since he shot to stardom as Jody Baxter in MGM’s 1946 movie of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling.

For that performance, Claude Jarman won a special miniature juvenile Oscar, the seventh of twelve bestowed by the Academy between 1934 (Shirley Temple) and 1960 (Hayley Mills). (Since then, the kids have had to take their chances in the regular categories.) Above are two photos of Mr. Jarman with his award. On the left, at age 12, he holds it fresh off the dais at the 1947 ceremony; on the right, he stands with me, holding the full-size replacement that the Academy gave him in exchange some years back.

Mr. Jarman’s Hollywood career after The Yearling was brief but not without distinction. His third picture, in 1949, was one of which he was deeply and justly proud. This was Intruder in the Dust, from William Faulkner’s novel of a black sharecropper (Juano Hernández in a performance of towering dignity) accused of murder in the Jim Crow South. A labor of love for Clarence Brown (who directed young Claude in The Yearling), it’s a rare foray into race relations for its time. Also in 1949, Mr. Jarman played Robert Sterling’s brother in the Mark Robson western Roughshod; later he was the soldier son of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), the teenage version of David Brian (who played his uncle in Intruder) in Inside Straight (1951), and a member of Fred MacMurray’s crew in the Republic swashbuckler Fair Wind to Java (1953).

After playing one of the Andrews Raiders in Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), Mr. Jarman didn’t act again until a supporting role in the 1978-79 NBC miniseries Centennial. In the meantime, with a degree from Vanderbilt University under his belt, he served a three-year hitch in the U.S. Navy, was chairman of the San Francisco International Film Festival from 1965 to 1980 (longer in fact than he was an actor in Hollywood), and served as Director of Cultural Affairs for the City of San Francisco.

With Richard Glazier’s permission, I’m currently transcribing our 2017 interview, so I’ll have more to post on Claude Jarman Jr. in the near future. But for now, I wanted to note his passing with regret and appreciation. Ave atque vale, Mr. Jarman, hail and farewell, and thanks for the memories.