CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
EN/FR
Search
Menu
Research dossier · People & Ideas

Peter Billingsley

American actor and filmmaker (born 1971)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Peter Billingsley, also known as Peter Michaelsen and Peter Billingsley-Michaelsen, is an American actor and filmmaker. He is best known for portraying Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story and A Christmas Story Christmas. He also played Jack Simmons in The Dirt Bike Kid, Billy in Death Valley, and Messy Marvin in a series of commercials for Hershey's Syrup in the 1980s. While an infant, he began acting in television commercials.

Editorial summary

“Peter Billingsley” enters the record as american actor and filmmaker (born 1971). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Peter, Billingsley and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current 70-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Peter, Billingsley and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Peter Billingsley” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Peter, Billingsley and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Peter Billingsley”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Peter Billingsley primary sources, Peter Billingsley archive and Peter research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Peter Billingsley”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Peter Billingsley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.