(CNN) -- For those who didn't know much about Shirley Temple, her passing this week revealed two surprises. First, that her post-Hollywood career was dominated by public service. She ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress in 1967, served as a representative to the United Nations and was ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia. And second, she was a Republican. She was that rarest of things nowadays: a Hollywood star who admitted to voting for the GOP. Today, Hollywood appears uniformly liberal. But once upon a time, things were different. While researching my forthcoming book on Hollywood and politics, I was surprised to discover how many vocal conservatives there were in Hollywood well into the 1970s - and that many of them enjoyed the company of Richard Nixon.
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Tim Stanley: Shirley Temple was American's sweetheart and a committed conservative
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Conservatism in Hollywood today is a rarity today
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Reagan, as president, wooed religious right; Hollywood conservatism declined, he says
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He says studios' political kingmakers now come from the left
@placeholder's willingness to reach out to the religious right meant that while he was certainly a product of the movie industry, he had effectively divorced himself from its libertine culture.