Anyone who’s ever watched an old Shirley Temple movie will surely appreciate why she makes the SK Dance Studio Top 10 Dancers of All Time list.  OK, so the corkscrew curls and fru-fru outfits may be a tad on the precocious side, but it can’t take away from the sheer brilliance of dancing displayed by this child star of the 1930s.

And she proved herself over and over in film after film… a stonking 43 of them in fact by the time she was twelve years old in 1940 (yes people – that’s FORTY THREE movies).

The quality of her tap dancing could run rings around many professional adult dancers, yet astoundingly she was infant school-aged in her first full length Hollywood Movie “Carolina”.

Shirley’s image and style was perhaps best epitomised by the number “Good Ship Lollipop” from the 1934 movie “Bright Eyes”. This sugar-coated ditty became Shirley’s theme tune and ever since, cute ‘baby class’ dancers have been delighting proud parents with their own renditions in dancing school shows across the land.

As she grew from a child and into a teenager, Shirley’s enormous box office pull gradually weakened. It seemed audiences simply didn’t want to deal with her inevitable adolescence – such a shame given her later films achieved critical acclaim despite their poor box office receipts.

Check Shirley out in this fantastic dance scene from the 1935 movie, the Littlest Rebel, where she’s partnered by another amazing tap dancer, Bill Bojangles Robinson.

So, for being so accomplished, yet so ridiculously young, Shirley deserves her place on the SK Dance Studio Top 10 Dancers of All Time list.