Actress who played Rhett and Scarlett's daughter dies

Cammie King Conlon, who portrayed the apple of Rhett Butler's eye in "Gone With the Wind," died Wednesday morning from a recurrence of lung cancer, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported. She was 76.

Conlon was 4 years old when she was cast as Bonnie Blue Butler, the ill-fated daughter of Rhett and Scarlett in the film adaptation of Atlantan Margaret Mitchell's classic novel.

In a 2002 interview with the AJC, Conlon said she recalled little about the movie, save for a scene with her celluloid father, Clark Gable.

"I remember, " she said, "looking carefully at the scene where Clark hugs me, kisses me and puts me to bed. Ah, it's one of life's cruel tricks that I couldn't have been older."

Three years after "Gone With the Wind," Conlon provided the  voice of Faline the doe in Walt Disney's "Bambi." It was her final film role.

"For a long time I always thought I wanted to go on stage," she told the AJC. "But rather than work at it, I think I was just waiting to be discovered."

Conlon, who married twice and had two children, eventually settled north of San Francisco, working as a marketing coordinator for the Fort Bragg-Mendocino Coast Chamber of Commerce.

As one of the last surviving members of the "GWTW" cast, Conlon was frequently invited to attend functions associated with the movie. In November 2002, she appeared at Jonesboro's Road to Tara Museum, her first visit to the county where Mitchell based her Civil War opus.

"I wonder what ['GWTW' producer] Mr. [David O.] Selznick thought of me?" she told the AJC in 2002. "I was tall, gangly, couldn't act, and they may or may not have dubbed my voice.

"But here it is 63 years later, and people still want to talk about Bonnie Blue Butler."

Of Bonnie Blue's most famous scene, when the pouty little girl fell from a pony to her death, Conlon recalled, "I wasn't able to play dead real good. My eyes were fluttering."

Olivia de Havilland, 94, who played Melanie Wilkes, is the only surviving lead cast member from "GWTW." She lives in Paris.