Mary Pickford: America's first screen megastar

The first thing to know about America’s sweetheart is that she was Canadian. It’s not so remarkable for a young actor to move to the States to seek work on Broadway, and eventually an undreamt-of place called Hollywood, nor for that person to change their name as soon as they find success. But the career of Mary Pickford, born Gladys Smith in Toronto in 1892, has been so often misrepresented that it is best to begin with the facts of the case, and not secondhand impressions.

Mary Pickford was an actor of great, unrivalled skill, a producer and a businesswoman. She emerged from poverty and a broken family to become a star who was loved by millions but also powerful behind the scenes. And contrary to many misapprehensions, she was capable of playing a wide range of roles, not just the little-girl parts she is most often associated with.

The Smith family were struggling before Gladys’s alcoholic father skipped town, only to die a few days later, after which his widow and three children were completely skint. The stage was their chosen route to security, and for a while the family lived a tough, unrewarding life, travelling the US by rail with cut-price theatre troupes. Aged 15, Gladys had her big break in a Broadway play called The Warrens of Virginia, produced by David Belasco, who prompted her to search through her family tree for a new name. Mary Pickford was borrowed from her English ancestors on her father’s side, and the rest of her immediate family soon adopted the new surname, too.

When The Warrens of Virginia came to the end of its run, Pickford demonstrated remarkable determination and chutzpah by looking for work in a film studio – Biograph, where DW Griffith gave her a screen test. Pickford negotiated herself an enviable salary, for a teenager, of £40 a week. The reason for the hard bargaining was not just that Pickford had the rest of her family to support, but that the young movie industry was held in such low esteem, she might never work on the legitimate stage again. As it was, Pickford’s Biograph stint was brief but legendary. Under Griffith’s direction, she honed a naturalistic style of acting perfectly suited to closeup photography, making her the world’s pre-eminent cinematic actor. And she made many, many films, sometimes almost one a week. Although she was young and pretty, she was not limited to ingenue roles. “I made a film in which I was the mother of several children, the eldest of whom was five years younger than I,” she remembered. “I played scrubwomen and secretaries and women of all nations. I noticed rather early that Mr Griffith seemed to favour me in the roles of Mexican and Indian women.”

During this period, in 1911, she also picked up a husband, Owen Moore, a mean drunk who worried her mother. He was a fellow actor, but rather sniffy about Pickford’s work, telling screenwriter Frances Marion that his wife had an “expressive little talent. Hardly what one would call cerebral.” The marriage was marred by Moore’s drinking, his violence and his insecurity over Pickford’s growing fame.

In 1912, Pickford left Griffith’s supervision. According to her, they had a row that resulted in her rashly declaring she would return to Broadway, and Belasco; Griffith harrumphed that they wouldn’t have her now she was in movies. Pickford made good on her promise, returning to the stage for a play called A Good Little Devil, and then, after making the incomparable The New York Hat, left Biograph for Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players studio.

Now Pickford’s fame really began to soar, especially in 1914, after she made Tess of the Storm Country. She used her celebrity to (adopted) patriotic effect during the first world war by touring the country and making promotional films for Liberty Bonds, but two more important things happen in this period. First, in 1916, she began to take control of the films she was making, to oversee the production entirely, from script to shooting to distribution. “So many things can ruin fine work,” she lamented. Pickford went from producer to mogul in 1919, when along with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and the man who was to become her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks, she started a new studio, United Artists, which planned to give creative control to actors and directors.

Second, it was at this time, in her mid-20s, that Pickford first began regularly to play children. In films including The Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Hoodlum and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Pickford unpinned her long, fair curls and performed as a child. Or not quite a child, as her audience well knew who she was: a grown woman of great glamour and charm, married and about to be divorced. The child roles that Pickford played weren’t silent simperers either, they were mostly working-class, either street urchins or bonny farm kids who threw punches and tumbled out of trees. When Pickford played upper-class characters, they were disconsolate brats itching to get out into the yard and have some proper fun. In Stella Maris, for example, she got to play both the bed-bound and mollycoddled title role, and Unity Blake, a working-class maid who comes to rescue her from her gilded cage. Frances Marion, Pickford’s friend and confidante, wrote characters for her that showed off her strength as an actor, and as a woman – the plucky young Gladys who had the nerve to make a career of her own.

When Pickford divorced Moore and married Fairbanks in 1920, her fame reached another level again: as the most popular couple in Hollywood, they entertained royalty at their lavish home, nicknamed Pickfair, and toured the world. For Pickford, a reluctant traveller, that meant meeting their far-flung fans, and finding new cinematic inspiration. When the couple watched Battleship Potemkin in Berlin in 1926, Pickford was reduced to tears, telling the director Sergei Eisenstein later: “[H]ow my hand had frozen to the umbrella I was holding, and how I had to pry it away with the other hand when the picture was over.” When Pickford had hired Ernst Lubitsch to make a film a few years earlier, she became the first producer to lure an established European director to Hollywood. While the film they made together (Rosita) was not a success, his subsequent American career justified the long journey.

The free camerawork and dramatic lighting Pickford saw in German films also inspired her masterpiece, Sparrows. In a nightmarish southern gothic world, seen through the eyes of children, as in Night of the Hunter or To Kill a Mockingbird, Pickford plays the eldest of a group of orphans doing indentured labour on a “baby farm”, surrounded by an alligator-infested swamp. The gruesome dangers represented by the swamp, and the vicious overseer (played by Gustav von Seyffertitz) throw the maternal virtues of Pickford’s “Mama” Molly and the enjoyably boisterous antics of the other children into relief. Charles Rosher, Pickford’s cinematographer of choice, and art director Harry Oliver created a horror landscape in a film suitable for children, which also includes a breathtaking pastoral vision of Christ. It’s often a grim watch, but always engrossing, and far away from the image of Pickford as a sugary child-sweetheart. In fact, aged 33, Pickford decided this would be her last juvenile performance.

Pickford’s final silent film was My Best Girl, a romantic comedy with Buddy Rogers, who would become her third husband, after the sad and messy end of her marriage to Fairbanks. The sound era saw Pickford retreat from film-making after a few misfires – more because her carefully controlled career was founded on playing kids, not adults, than because she failed to rise to the challenge of the microphone. “I left the screen,” she told Kevin Brownlow. “The little girl made me. I wasn’t waiting for the little girl to kill me.”

In the decades that followed, Pickford lapsed into the heavy drinking that many in her family had succumbed to, but continued to be a face in Hollywood, mentoring Shirley Temple’s career while the younger star remade many of her own films. When she was given an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1976, she received it on camera, at home in Pickfair, and with a tear visible in her eye. She died three years later.

This profile was written in response to a request in the comments by TheKevster. If there is an aspect of silent cinema you would like to see featured in Silent but deadly! let me know below.