Elizabeth Teresa “Terry” Burnham (August 8, 1949 – October 7, 2013) belonged to that small, poignant class of performers who become familiar to millions before they’re old enough to understand what fame is. A Los Angeles native, Burnham worked steadily through the late 1950s and 1960s as a child actress, appearing in a long list of television dramas and anthology shows at a time when TV was hungry for naturalistic young talent. Today she’s most often remembered for two standout appearances: her role as Susie, the tender-hearted little girl in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), and her haunting turn as the child at the center of The Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare as a Child” (1960). Both performances captured what made Burnham special—her ability to be open and disarming on camera without seeming coached or cute for its own sake.
Burnham was born in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles to Guy Calvin Burnham, an aeronautics engineer at Douglas Aircraft Company, and Elizabeth Teresa Buelna Symons, a homemaker. She was the younger of two children. Her upbringing appears to have been stable and traditionally Catholic; she attended several local parochial and public schools in the city. Nothing in the early record suggests a stage-family push or a vaudeville pedigree. Instead, Burnham’s entrance into acting seems to fit a classic postwar Hollywood pattern: a bright, expressive child with the right look and temperament who tested well for television, then found herself in constant demand.
She made her television debut at the age of six, on December 22, 1955, in Climax! in an episode called “The Day They Gave the Babies Away.” In the ecosystem of 1950s live or semi-live TV drama, such a debut was no small thing. Anthology series like Climax! needed young actors who could hit marks, follow direction quickly, and convey emotion without the safety net of multiple takes. Burnham’s early work evidently impressed producers, because she was soon appearing in more high-profile dramas. In 1957 she was featured in an episode of M Squad titled “Let There Be Light,” opposite Lee Marvin. Burnham later cited Marvin as her favorite actor, which is telling: many child performers remember adult co-stars who treated them kindly or took their work seriously. Her comment suggests that even at eight she was paying attention not just to the role but to the craft around her.
That same year, industry buzz briefly built around Burnham as a possible breakout star. She was announced as the lead in a proposed child-centered television series called Turquoise, Inc., and the show’s creators went so far as to promote her as “TV’s first Shirley Temple.” The comparison was flattering but also revealing. In the late 1950s, producers were still looking for a new generation of child icons who could combine warmth with resilience—kids who could play in adult stories without derailing them. Turquoise, Inc. never made it to air, but the hype around it reflects how strongly Burnham read on screen. She wasn’t just competent; she had the kind of camera-friendly sincerity that made people imagine her as a franchise.
She soon appeared on Shirley Temple’s own anthology series in an episode titled “The Magic Fishbone,” adapted from a Charles Dickens story. It was a neat symbolic passing of the torch, even if Burnham never became a Temple-scale celebrity. Instead, her career unfolded in the more typical child-actor way of the era: a steady stream of guest roles across network television, each episode giving her a slightly different emotional key to play.
Burnham’s most visible film work arrived in 1959 with Imitation of Life, one of the defining glossy melodramas of its moment. In the film, she played Susie, the young daughter of Lana Turner’s character. Susie is a child who feels the emotional weather of adults—love, insecurity, jealousy, dependence—without fully grasping its causes. That combination of innocence and emotional intelligence is hard to portray without slipping into sentimentality. Burnham pulled it off. She gave Susie a softness that didn’t feel staged, and a moral clarity that made the character more than a plot device. When the film jumps forward to Susie’s teenage years (played by Sandra Dee), you can still feel Burnham’s groundwork in the way the older Susie behaves: the same yearning to be loved, the same instinct to cling, the same vulnerability masked by brightness. For a child performer, that kind of tonal continuity is a quiet triumph.
Just a year later, Burnham delivered what many fans consider her signature performance in The Twilight Zone. “Nightmare as a Child,” originally broadcast in 1960, is a small, eerie story centered on memory, fear, and the way childhood trauma can surface in fragments. Burnham played a child whose presence is both fragile and unsettling—not because she is monstrous, but because she embodies something unresolved. The episode depends on the child being believable as a real girl while also feeling like a doorway to something darker. Burnham’s calmness, the way she looks at adults as if she’s half-afraid and half-wiser than them, gives the episode its emotional sting. It’s a performance that holds up because it doesn’t overplay the genre; she treats the situation as real, which makes the supernatural elements feel more intimate and disturbing.
Through the 1960s Burnham continued to work consistently on television, appearing in numerous series at a time when guest spots were the lifeblood of a young actor’s résumé. The era’s TV landscape—westerns, family dramas, crime procedurals, anthology thrillers—offered child actors a rotating gallery of roles: the endangered daughter, the troubled witness, the sick child, the hopeful orphan, the moral compass. Burnham seems to have moved easily among these parts, never pinned to a single persona. That versatility may be why she stayed employed while many child actors flashed brightly and vanished.
Yet she did vanish, at least from the screen. In 1971, still only in her early twenties, Burnham retired from acting. No scandal, no public breakdown, no messy tabloid trail—just a quiet exit. For some former child actors, stepping away is a survival choice, a way to reclaim a private life before the industry defines them permanently. Burnham’s retirement reads as deliberate and firm. There are no widely known attempts at a comeback, no half-hearted returns in later decades. She seems to have chosen an adult identity detached from her childhood fame, which, given the hazards of child stardom, may have been a healthy and even courageous decision.
Her later life remained largely out of public view. What is known underscores a sad kind of anonymity that sometimes follows early fame. Burnham died of cardiac arrest on October 7, 2013, at the age of 64. With no surviving next of kin, her cremated remains went unclaimed and were held by Los Angeles County. Five years later, on August 8, 2018—what would have been her 69th birthday—her ashes were buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Long Beach. The delayed burial has a melancholy symbolism to it: the child star who once belonged to the public, then lived privately, finally laid to rest in a quiet gesture of remembrance.
Burnham’s legacy isn’t built on a single towering career arc, but on moments—glimpses of a young performer who brought gravity to adult stories. In Imitation of Life, she helped anchor a film about race, motherhood, and identity with a child’s emotional truth. In The Twilight Zone, she became one of the series’ most memorable faces of innocence touched by dread. And across television, she represents a lost style of child acting: unforced, present, and tuned to the reality of the scene rather than to the audience’s applause.
People who revisit her work now often feel a particular kind of nostalgia—not just for her performances, but for the era of television and film that trusted a child to be quietly human instead of loudly adorable. Terry Burnham didn’t grow into a movie star, and she didn’t try to. She left behind a small but enduring body of work that still flickers with sincerity whenever those old frames roll.
