SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Jackie Lynn Taylor Fries, a pioneering TV personality and show business veteran who was one of the Little Rascals in the beloved “Our Gang” comedy films, died Monday with Alzheimer’s disease, her husband said. She was 88.

Known mostly as Jackie Lynn Taylor, Fries spent more than 70 years in the public eye as a Hollywood actor, TV host, news anchor, motivational speaker and ordained minister.

The Citrus Heights, Calif., resident was best known to audiences around the world for her role as one of the few girls in the Little Rascals. She was the female lead in five “Our Gang” movies released in 1934. She debuted as Jane, the “girlfriend” of gang leader Wally Albright, in “Hi-Neighbor,” one of the most well-liked films in the in the “Our Gang” movies, which began in the 1920s as silent films and continued into the 1940s.

The enduring series is acclaimed by critics for its use of child performers who behaved naturally on screen and often were poor in real life. Also, in an era of racial and gender prejudice, the films accorded equal status among blacks and whites and boys and girls.

“We didn’t have scripts,” Fries told The Sacramento Bee in 2000. “We played together. We were kids who worked together, who played together and who went to school together. We weren’t great actors, but we got along.”

Like all the cast, she was replaced as she grew too “old” to be a Little Rascal.

“I think that being a member of the Rascals has kept me young,” she said in 2001.


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