'It's a Wonderful Life' in Colorado Springs: Karolyn 'Zuzu' Grimes embodies film's enduring message during local stop

Nov. 4—Karolyn Grimes had never seen "It's A Wonderful Life" when a reporter knocked on the front door of her Kansas home.

The stranger asked her if she was the little girl with the famous line — the one about bells and angels and wings — in one of America's most iconic films. She was — or she had been, decades earlier — the 6-year-old playing the role of Zuzu, George Bailey's youngest daughter. But it was 1980, and she was a 40-year-old mother raising seven children in the Midwest, far from that distant life as a child star in Hollywood, and content to be so.

Still, she agreed to the interview.

"I brought all my memorabilia up from the basement," Grimes, now 82, said. "I was completely shocked when, the next week, the same thing happened again. It just kept happening, then I started getting fan mail. And I thought, 'I'd better sit down and watch this film.'"

She said that from there, the movie's message — embodied by Jimmy Stewart's Bailey, a sacrificial banker who, despite his financial losses and failures, became the "richest man in town" in how he touched the lives of others — was revealed to her, as was her role in sharing that message. She's "been on the road ever since," living out what she called her "new life purpose" of traveling the country as an unofficial ambassador of the movie and all it represents, including to Colorado Springs, where she will attend the Colorado Country Christmas Gift Show this weekend.

If there is one to steward the movie's message, it would be Grimes, who has faced her own share of life's tragedies. After an acting career spanning 15 movies, including "The Bishop's Wife" starring Cary Grant and "Rio Grande" with John Wayne, she left Hollywood at 14 following the death of her mother, who had suffered from early-onset Alzheimer's disease. A year later, her father died in a car crash.

The court ordered the only child to the tiny town of Osceola, Missouri to live with her uncle and his petulant wife, who didn't want much to do with dancing, singing or movies, Grimes said. While she knew she had acted before, her mother had never let her in on the fame of her co-stars, to keep her grounded.

"I'm sure there was a divine kind of pattern that I was supposed to follow, and one of those was to be picked out of Hollywood," Grimes said. "I think I was chosen to be that little girl because I did have a lot of adversity as I was growing up, but I always felt there was something positive out there and I always reach for that."

She went on to marry and have two daughters. Grimes and her first husband later divorced, and he was killed in a hunting accident two years later, her biography said. She married again, taking on the nurturing of her second husband's three children and having two more, and worked as a medical technician.

In the movie, Bailey's life and resounding impact on his community could have ended had his guardian angel not talked him from the bridge and shown him a chilling alternate universe where he had never been born. Grimes bears this motif with strength, as her own youngest son died by suicide when he was 18. With that grief still fresh, her husband of 25 years died from lung cancer.

"It's a Wonderful Life"'s popularity lay dormant for decades, having been a disappointment in the box offices in post-World War II America. Then its copyright expired, and TV stations had free-for-all access to the 1946 classic, resurging multi-generational interest in the film that endures today.

Grimes and the movie found each other again, around the time when Stewart himself began getting fan letters inquiring about the fate of that grinning little girl with blonde curls.

"I left (acting in the movie) in the closet and said goodbye," Grimes said, laughing. "It was part of my past and that's where I thought it would stay. But, my gosh, it didn't."

As one of the last surviving actors of the film, she said she finds joy in bringing that movie to life for those of generations who grew up in the movie's fledgling years and those who have had it passed onto them during Christmastime traditions. She now travels to gift shows, modern movie screenings and her annual It's A Wonderful Life Festival in Seneca Falls, N.Y., which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in December.

"I'm gonna keep doing it as long as my legs are working and my head's working and my heart's working," Grimes said.

As part of her November tour, she can be found at the Colorado Springs Event Center, located at 3960 Palmer Park Blvd., which launched Friday and continues Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

As her Hollywood career ended in her teenage years, Grimes is not immediately recognizable as Bailey's "little ginger snap." But she loves seeing people's reactions to realizing her identity: "their mouths drop, their faces smile and they feel a joy that I love watching," she said.

And drop they did. Dozens of unknowing fans, including Pat Johnson and Maria Gray of Colorado Springs, lit up as Grimes' biographer and assistant, Clay Eals, asked them if they knew who sat behind the counter full of movie stills, ornaments and even bells made by Bevin Bells, the same company that cast those used in the film.

Johnson and Gray, like many others, fought back tears as they held onto Grimes's hands.

"I had to go and grow up," Grimes said in the same soft voice with a clever sense of humor. "But not everybody can say they've been in the arms of Jimmy Stewart."

Grimes said those reactions, as well as the joy she finds in getting to embody both the nostalgia of the movie with its enduring and hard-hitting relevance, keeps her going.

"I think we need (the message) more than ever today," she said. "It's about how each man's life touches another and how we all can make a difference. ... A lot of people (need that) right now; there's so much turmoil in the world. It's one constant that you can turn to and get a positive feeling. It gives you hope."