The Little Match Girl Appearances
Something about the Little Match Girl seems to really draw people to adapt her into other less traditional mediums. While there have been direct adaptations and reimaginings of the story, they're vastly outnumbered by the number of times the Little Match girl is treated more as a thematic inspiriation, or appeared as a character in some other story. Before we get to the normal adaptations, here are some of the character's stranger appearances.
This is crazy, but it turns out that the Little Match Girl and her counterpart in GND Tiny Tim have ALREADY CROSSED OVER. In Rankin-Bass's 1978 traditional animation special The Stingiest Man In Town, during a montage of Scrooge being a jerk to people we see him buy two boxes of matches from an unvoiced Little Match Girl but paying her with a button. Then at the end, a reformed Scrooge sees her freezing in the snow and gives her his coat and a heaping handful of gold coins.
In the 1996 Terry Pratchett Diskworld novel Hogfather, Death (while serving as the Hogfather and fixated on the idea of fairness for all) chooses to save her life and give her a future. I'd like to suggest that this is the version of the character that makes her appearance in GND, both because the series already has an affinity for Discworld content, and because holy crap, this story is depressing otherwise.
2002's Resurrection of the Little Match Girl is... wait for it... a Korean action movie. Lim Eun-kyung plays the only rendition of the Little Match Girl to regularly aim guns at people.
Tons of musical pieces have been written to tell the story of the Little Match Girl, literally or thematically. This generally doesn't give us a visual to share, but we can use this image from the music video for the 2005 song 'Breathe' by Erasure, which retold the story in a quasi-futuristic setting. I can't find just who this adorable little girl is, but you can at least watch the video here:
In addition to just adapting the character, the actual text of the story is referenced pretty often too. This may not count as an adaptation of the character, but I'm including it anyway because it's awesome: In Tori Amos's 2013 musical 'The Light Princess', the main character Althea (played in the original West End cast by Rosalie Craig) reads the Little Match Girl and compares the girl's plight to her own.
The themes and images of The Little Match Girl are extremely popular in Japanese Manga where it is referenced constantly. Match Shoujo (literally The Little Match Girl) is a Japanese manga series by Sanami Suzuki, in which the matches actually grant wishes and lead to disturbing tales. The manga saw a live-action adaptation in 2016 starring Sumire Sato from the idol group SKE38, and also featuring Yutaka Kobayashi and Takafumi Honda from the boy band 'Boys and Men'
If all that wasn't weird enough... something about the story of the Little Match Girl makes her seem like good fodder for video games. There are tons of video game adaptations of the story in low budget PC games and the mobile market, but very noteably, the Little Match Girl actually appeared in 2012's Yakuza 5, and then again in other games in the series.
Perhaps most incredibly, the Little Match Girl appears in Blood and Wine, the 2016 expansion to the acclaimed video game Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The world of the Witcher has always been based on updated versions of classic fairy tales, and the Little Match Girl certainly qualifies. Here, The Little Match Girl has decided that no one buys matches anymore, and has switched over to selling tobacco, alcohol, and fisstech, which is essentially cocaine. (she even gives out the first hit for free!)
Moving on to more traditional adaptations of the character: There are several noteable silent films based on The Little Match Girl, but of course there's no real record of who plays her in any of these movies, because the laws protecting child actors didn't really exist. The first, 1902's The Little Match Seller, is three minutes long and is basically a special effects blockbuster for it's time. You can watch it here. Or, if you can watch 1914's 9-minute The Little Match Girl here, although the only surviving copy has Dutch intertitles.
Le petite matchande d'allumettes (which i think is just literally 'The Little Match Girl') is a French 1928 silent film directed by the legendery silent film auteur Jean Renoir. Becaues of the pedigree of it's creator, we actually know the name of the performer playing the Little Match Girl; Catherine Hessling,
Den Lille pige med svovlstikkerne was a Danish short film from the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, where the story is told by a narrator. Incredibly, I can't find a credit for the little girl from the movie.
A contemporary version of the story set in Cincinatti was filmed in 1974 and placed in syndication on the family channel until 1982. This version is best remembered for starring a 9-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker.
the 1986 TV musical The Little Match Girl had fashion model Twiggy and the Who's Roger Daltrey in the lead, but the titular Little Match Girl was played by Natalie Morse
1987's The Little Match Girl was a TV movie starring Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played Rudy on the Cosby Show, the most popular sitcom of the era. She shared the screen with Rue McClanahan, star of another extremely popular sitcom the Golden Girls.
Disney created it's short The Little Matchgirl as a segment for it's scrapped Fantasia 2006 movie, setting the story to the third movement of Nocturne from String Quarter No. 2 in D Major by Alexander Borodin. It debuted at the Annecy International Animated Film festival in France before being included as an extra in the home release of another adaptation of a Hans Christian Anderson story; The Little Mermaid.
The 2015 British short film Matchstick Girl was a contemporary adaptation of the story made to raise awareness of child homelessness in the UK. It stars Joely Mae Greally, and you can watch it here: but be warned, this girl's performance is pretty harrowing.