Janet Ann Gallow, who has died aged 84, made her name as Cloestine Hussman, a young girl captured by the monster in Erle C Kenton’s cult horror The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) opposite Bela Lugosi, and with Lon Chaney Jr as the monster.

In the film Chaney carries Cloestine up on to a roof to retrieve her ball, killing two villagers who try to intervene. When she asks him to take her back down, the Monster returns her to her father and is captured by police.

The five-year-old Janet Ann was chosen for the role because Kenton reckoned that she would not be afraid of Chaney in his green Frankenstein make-up. “I wasn’t frightened of him at all!” she wrote in 2009. “Behind the make-up was a gentle giant, quite literally.”

She recalled that filming was often delayed because Chaney suffered an allergic reaction to the green paint used by the make-up artist: “Not that I minded, it gave me time to play on the studio lot.”

In real life Janet Ann came to regard Chaney as a “ favourite uncle” and their friendship lasted long after filming was over. Indeed, when her mother died just after the Second World War, he offered to adopt Janet Ann and her baby brother, but the offer was turned down by her father.

Janet Ann Gallow was born in San Jose, California, on July 21 1937. Her mother had been a budding stage actress but when she failed to make it as a film star she focused her ambitions on her daughter.

Janet Ann was just four when The Ghost of Frankenstein went into pre-production in December 1941. It received mixed reviews, but she went on to take uncredited roles in other films, including the Bud Abbott and Lou Costello comedy adventure, It Ain’t Hay (1943) and the Second World War melodrama Till We Meet Again (1944) with Ray Milland, and she joined Franchot Tone and Susanna Foster in That Night with You (1945).

When her mother died suddenly in 1946, her father found it too hard to manage his job and his family and to run Janet around the Hollywood studios. She made her last film, Canyon Passage, starring Dana Andrews, aged nine, in 1946.

She then went back to school, married her childhood sweetheart in her teens and had two children. When that marriage failed, she found a job as a secretary with an aviation company. A decade later, she returned to college to train as a pre-school teacher and married again.

Over the last two decades as interest in her career as a child star grew, Janet Ann Gallow appeared at horror movie conventions and ended up accepting a cameo role in director Wally Wingert’s Living on a Prayer (2005), co-starring Larry Storch and Stella Stevens.

“It was such fun to be back around movie people, “ she said. “They treated me so well. It was as if I’d never left”.

Her children and a stepson survive her.

Janet Ann Gallow, born July 21 1937, died November 13 2020