Cora Sue Collins, who rose to stardom as a child actress while playing the daughter or younger version of seemingly every leading lady in 1930s Hollywood — Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, Norma Shearer — died April 27 at her home in Beverly Hills, California. She was 98.

The cause was complications from a stroke, said her daughter, Susie McKay Krieser.

Ms. Collins, a dimpled and curly-haired West Virginia native, was only 4 when she debuted in “The Unexpected Father,” a 1932 comedy starring Slim Summerville and ZaSu Pitts. Critics were delighted by her performance as a waifish youngster who, in one scene, serves as cover for a bootlegger, lying on top of bottles of booze while being pushed around in a stroller.

“Wait till you see Cora Sue,” wrote Photoplay’s reviewer. “Just four, and walks away with everything.”

Over the following 13 years, Ms. Collins appeared in almost 50 movies, working with marquee actors including James Cagney in “Picture Snatcher” (1933), Kay Francis in “Mary Stevens, M.D.” (1933) and Bette Davis in “All This, and Heaven Too” (1940).

Cast as a younger version of Frances Dee’s character in “The Strange Case of Clara Deane” (1932), she received better reviews than some of her adult peers, with Motion Picture magazine calling her the “latest cinema tot to teach her elders a thing or two about real emotional acting.”

Ms. Collins was typically cast in supporting roles or bit parts. She played a young Shearer in “Smilin’ Through” (1932), which received an Oscar nomination for best picture, and a young Merle Oberon in the World War I drama “The Dark Angel” (1935). She also played the daughter of Sylvia Sidney in “Jennie Gerhardt” (1933), of Colbert in “Torch Singer” (1933), of Colleen Moore in “The Scarlet Letter” (1934) and of Loy in “Evelyn Prentice” (1934).

“I must have the most common face in the world,” she said at a 2019 event for the Los Angeles Public Library, “because I played either the most famous actresses of the ‘30s, as a child, or their child, so they made me up to look like everybody.”

On the studio lot at MGM, she acquired the nickname “Baby Garbo” for appearing as Garbo’s younger self in “Queen Christina” (1933), a biopic about the 17th-century Swedish monarch.

Ms. Collins said Garbo was far from the prickly, sphinxlike figure the actress was made out to be; instead, she was a “soft, gentle” woman who regularly invited her for tea in her dressing room. Ms. Collins went, happily, but stuck to drinking milk. She reunited with Garbo for “Anna Karenina” (1935), and remained friends with the actress until Garbo’s death in 1990.

“Movies were incredibly magical to me back then,” she said in a 2003 interview. “All little girls want to play dress up, and there I was in an industry where I was being dressed by the most famous costume designers. I was made-up by the most famous makeup men and hairdressers; I was taught by the most famous choreographers, and was permitted to play with the most famous movie stars.”

Yet the industry could also be a lonely, predatory business, she said. She worked six days a week and often spent her Sunday afternoons doing odd jobs for “Mr. Mayer,” MGM executive Louis B. Mayer, who “would have me either teaching his grandchildren how to ride horseback or entertaining dignitaries,” as she put it in an interview with the cinema history group Film Masters.

“I really had no childhood at all,” she said.

Ms. Collins had fond memories of actors including Pat O’Brien, whom she nicknamed “Uncle Pat,” and Peter Lorre, “a sweet, dear man” who accidentally dropped a scalpel on Ms. Collins, leaving a scar that she jokingly described as “a souvenir” while shooting a scene with her in the horror movie “Mad Love” (1935).

But she also said she was exploited and harassed, including during a western-themed birthday party for fellow child star Jane Withers.

“A photographer took me to a hay wagon and had me bend over — supposedly looking for a needle in a haystack,” she said in an interview for Dick Moore’s 1984 book about child actors, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: But Don’t Have Sex or Take the Car.”

“I was so foolish I went for it. When the picture came out in a magazine, after being airbrushed, Mother dutifully put it in my scrapbook. That’s when I saw it. … It gave me a terrible complex. So I burned all my scrapbooks and every still of myself I could get my hands on.”

Ms. Collins later alleged that around the time she turned 17, screenwriter Harry Ruskin offered her a part if she would sleep with him. Ms. Collins, who had considered Ruskin a mentor, ran from his office and sought help from Mayer.

“He greeted her happily, assuming, as he put it, ‘Harry gave you the good news,’” author and historian Cari Beauchamp reported in Vanity Fair in 2019. “When she protested, Mayer put his hand ‘with those stubby little fingers’ on her shoulder and softly informed her, ‘You’ll get used to it.’”

Ms. Collins said that when she told her mother what had happened, her mother didn’t believe her. Instead, she insisted that Ms. Collins “apologize” to Ruskin and Mayer. Ms. Collins refused and, after appearing in the 1945 movie “Week-End at the Waldorf” starring Ginger Rogers and Lana Turner, decided to retire from acting.

“To this day,” she told Ireland’s Image magazine in 2020, “it’s the best single decision of my life.”

The younger of two sisters, Cora Sue Collins was born in Beckley, West Virginia, on April 19, 1927. Her parents separated and, at age 3, she moved to Hollywood with her mother and sister.

Ms. Collins said she was standing next to them on the sidewalk one day, waiting to register her sister in school, when a car screeched to a halt. Out came a woman who gestured to Ms. Collins and her mother and asked, “Would you like to put your little girl in pictures?”

Her mother replied: “That’s why I brought her to Hollywood.”

Three hours later, after a visit to a casting call, Ms. Collins had a contract with Universal.

She later worked opposite Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor in the melodrama “Magnificent Obsession” (1935); played Amy Lawrence, the rival of Becky Thatcher, in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1938), starring Tommy Kelly; and landed a rare leading role in the crime drama “Youth on Trial” (1945), as the rebellious daughter of a juvenile court judge.

At age 16, in 1943, she married Ivan Stauffer, the proprietor of the Clover Club in Hollywood. Over the following four years, they divorced, remarried and divorced. Her marriage to James McKay, a former owner of Lake Tahoe’s Cal-Neva resort and casino, also ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage to Jim Cox.

For a time, Ms. Collins lived in Mexico, where she took up competitive water skiing. In 1969, she married Harry Nace Jr., a former minor league baseball player who ran a chain of movie theaters in Arizona.

Ms. Collins became known as Susie Nace, although she continued to use her birth name at classic film festivals and repertory screenings, where she was often interviewed about her career. She and her husband, who died in 2002, split their time between Paris and Phoenix, where they were known for hosting Liberace at an annual post-concert dinner party for the singer and pianist.

In addition to her daughter Susie McKay Krieser, survivors include a son, Trey Nace; a stepdaughter, Teresa Nace Cabebe; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. She was predeceased by two children, Jamie and Melinda McKay Nace.

Ms. Collins said she had little interest in steering her own children toward show business.

“As far as I’m concerned, children should be cogs in a wheel, they should not be at the center,” she told the website Cinephiled in 2015. “When an entire family revolves around a small child, it puts that child in a very odd position and gives her responsibilities that she really should not have at that age.”

“I can’t tell you,” she continued, “how much I enjoyed being an anonymous housewife later on in my life.”