Mary Pickford
Gladys Louise Smith, known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian American film actress and producer. A pioneer in the American film industry with a Hollywood career that spanned five decades, Pickford was one of the most popular actresses of the silent film era. Beginning her film career in 1909, Pickford became Hollywood's first millionaire by 1916, and, at the height of her career, had complete creative control of her films and was one of the most recognizable women in the world. Due to her popularity, unprecedented international fame, and success as an actress and businesswoman, she was known as the "Queen of the Movies". She was a significant figure in the development of film acting and is credited with having defined the ingénue type in cinema, a persona that also earned her the nickname "America's Sweetheart".
In 1919, she co-founded United Artists alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith, and was also one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. She was awarded the second Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound film role in Coquette and received an Academy Honorary Award in 1976 in consideration of her contributions to American cinema. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Pickford as the 24th-greatest female star of Classical Hollywood Cinema.
Early life
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892, at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, now the location of the Hospital for Sick Children. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of English Methodist immigrants, and worked a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was of Irish Catholic descent and worked for a time as a seamstress. Pickford had two younger siblings, both actors. Charlotte was billed as "Lottie Pickford" and John Charles Jr. was billed as "Jack Pickford". To please her husband's relatives, Pickford's mother baptized her children as Methodists, the religion of their father. John Charles Sr. was an alcoholic. He died on February 11, 1898, from a fatal blood clot caused by a workplace accident when he was a purser with Niagara Steamship.The house was situated in a poor district of Toronto known as "The Ward" where disease was prevalent. When Gladys was four years old, her household was under infectious quarantine as a public health measure. Their devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother asked a visiting Roman Catholic priest to baptize the children. Pickford was at this time baptized as Gladys Marie Smith. Gladys attended McCaul School on University Avenue.
After being widowed in 1898, Charlotte Smith began taking in boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, the theatrical stage manager for Cummings Stock Company, who soon suggested that Gladys, then age seven, and Lottie, then age six, be given two small theatrical roles—Gladys portrayed a girl and a boy, while Lottie was cast in a silent part in the company's production of The Silver King at Toronto's Princess Theatre, while their mother played the organ. Pickford subsequently acted in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, ultimately playing the major child role in its version of The Silver King. She concluded her early career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eva in the Valentine production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, adapted from the 1852 novel.
Career
Early years
By the early 1900s, theatre had become a family enterprise. Gladys, her mother, and two younger siblings toured the United States by rail, performing in third-rate companies and plays. After six impoverished years, Pickford allowed one more summer to land a leading role on Broadway, planning to quit acting if she failed. In 1905, she played the boy Freckles in Hal Reid's The Gypsy Girl on tour, and at the Star Theatre on Broadway. In 1906, Gladys, Lottie, and Jack Smith supported singer Chauncey Olcott on Broadway in Edmund Burke. Gladys finally landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, The Warrens of Virginia. The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, Cecil, appeared in the cast. David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. After completing the Broadway run the play toured, including a stop in her home town of Toronto. It played at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in January 1909.On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film Pippa Passes. The role went to someone else but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford. She quickly grasped that movie acting was simpler than the stylized stage acting of the day. Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day but, after Pickford's single day in the studio, Griffith agreed to pay her $10 a day against a guarantee of $40 a week.
Pickford, like all actors at Biograph, played both leading roles and bit parts, including mothers, ingénues, charwomen, spitfires, slaves, Native Americans, spurned women, and a prostitute. As Pickford said of her success at Biograph:
I played scrubwomen and secretaries and women of all nationalities... I decided that if I could get into as many pictures as possible, I'd become known, and there would be a demand for my work.She appeared in 51 films in 1909—almost one a week—with her first starring role being in The Violin Maker of Cremona opposite future husband Owen Moore. While at Biograph, she suggested to Florence La Badie to "try pictures", invited her to the studio and later introduced her to D. W. Griffith, who launched La Badie's career.
In January 1910, Pickford traveled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other film companies wintered on the West Coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the East. Pickford added to her 1909 Biographs with films made in California.
Actors were not listed in the credits in Griffith's company. Audiences noticed and identified Pickford within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors, in turn, capitalized on her popularity by advertising on sandwich boards that a film featuring "The Girl with the Golden Curls", "Blondilocks", or "The Biograph Girl" was inside.
Pickford left Biograph in December 1910. The following year, she starred in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company. IMP was absorbed into Universal Pictures in 1912, along with Majestic. Unhappy with their creative standards, Pickford returned to work with Griffith in 1912. Some of her best performances were in his films, such as Friends, The Mender of Nets, Just Like a Woman, and The Female of the Species. That year, Pickford also introduced Dorothy and Lillian Gish—whom she had befriended as new neighbors from Ohio—to Griffith, and each became a major silent film star, in comedy and tragedy, respectively. Pickford made her last Biograph picture, The New York Hat, in late 1912.
She returned to Broadway in the David Belasco production of A Good Little Devil. This was a major turning point in her career. Pickford, who had always hoped to conquer the Broadway stage, discovered how deeply she missed film acting. In 1913, she decided to work exclusively in film. The previous year, Adolph Zukor had formed Famous Players in Famous Plays. It was later known as Famous Players–Lasky and then Paramount Pictures, one of the first American feature film companies.
Pickford left the stage to join Zukor's roster of stars. Zukor believed film's potential lay in recording theatrical players in replicas of their most famous stage roles and productions. Zukor first filmed Pickford in a silent version of A Good Little Devil. The film, produced in 1913, showed the play's Broadway actors reciting every line of dialogue, resulting in a stiff film that Pickford later called "one of the worst I ever made... it was deadly". Zukor agreed; he held the film back from distribution for a year.
Pickford's work in material written for the camera by that time had attracted a strong following. Comedy-dramas, such as In the Bishop's Carriage, Caprice, and especially Hearts Adrift, made her irresistible to moviegoers. Hearts Adrift was so popular that Pickford asked for the first of her many publicized pay raises based on the profits and reviews. The film marked the first time Pickford's name was featured above the title on movie marquees. Tess of the Storm Country was released five weeks later. Biographer Kevin Brownlow observed that the film "sent her career into orbit and made her the most popular actress in America, if not the world".
Her appeal was summed up two years later by the February 1916 issue of Photoplay as "luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity". Only Charlie Chaplin, who slightly surpassed Pickford's popularity in 1916, had a similarly spellbinding pull with critics and the audience. Each enjoyed a level of fame far exceeding that of other actors. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world, or, as a silent-film journalist described her, "the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history".
Stardom
Pickford starred in 52 features throughout her career. On June 24, 1916, Pickford signed a new contract with Zukor that granted her full authority over production of the films in which she starred, and a record-breaking salary of $10,000 a week. In addition, Pickford's compensation was half of a film's profits, with a guarantee of $1.04 million, making her the first actress to sign a million-dollar contract. She also became vice-president of Pickford Film Corporation.Occasionally, she played a child, in films such as The Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Daddy-Long-Legs, and Pollyanna. Pickford's fans were devoted to these "little girl" roles, but they were not typical of her career. Due to her lack of a normal childhood, she enjoyed making these pictures. Given how small she was at under five feet, and her naturalistic acting abilities, she was very successful in these roles. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., when he first met her in person as a boy, assumed she was a new playmate for him, and asked her to come and play trains with him, which she obligingly did.
In August 1918, Pickford's contract expired and, when refusing Zukor's terms for a renewal, she was offered $250,000 to leave the motion picture business. She declined, and went to First National Pictures, which agreed to her terms. In 1919, Pickford, along with D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, formed the independent film production company United Artists. Through United Artists, Pickford continued to produce and perform in her own movies; she could also distribute them as she chose. In 1920, Pickford's film Pollyanna grossed around. The following year, Pickford's film Little Lord Fauntleroy was also a success, and in 1923, Rosita grossed over $1 million as well. During this period, she also made Little Annie Rooney, another film in which Pickford played a child, Sparrows, which blended the Dickensian with newly minted German expressionist style, and My Best Girl, a romantic comedy featuring her future husband Charles "Buddy" Rogers.
File:MaryPickford4.jpg|thumb|A lobby card for Little Lord Fauntleroy
The arrival of sound was her undoing. Pickford underestimated the value of adding sound to movies, claiming that "adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo".
She played a reckless socialite in Coquette, her first talkie, a role for which her famous ringlets were cut into a 1920s bob. Pickford had already cut her hair in the wake of her mother's death in 1928. Fans were shocked at the transformation. Pickford's hair had become a symbol of female virtue, and when she cut it, the act made front-page news in The New York Times and other papers. Coquette was a success and won her an Academy Award for Best Actress, although this was highly controversial. The public failed to respond to her in the more sophisticated roles. Like most movie stars of the silent era, Pickford found her career fading as talkies became more popular among audiences.
Her next film, The Taming of The Shrew, made with husband Douglas Fairbanks, was not well received at the box office. Established Hollywood actors were panicked by the impending arrival of the talkies. On March 29, 1928, The Dodge Brothers Hour was broadcast from Pickford's bungalow, featuring Fairbanks, Chaplin, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, John Barrymore, D. W. Griffith, and Dolores del Río, among others. They spoke on the radio show to prove that they could meet the challenge of talking movies.
A transition in the roles Pickford selected came when she was in her late thirties, no longer able to play the children, teenage spitfires, and feisty young women so adored by her fans, and not suited for the glamorous and vampish heroines of early sound. In 1933, she underwent a Technicolor screen test for an animated/live-action film version of Alice in Wonderland, but Walt Disney discarded the project when Paramount Pictures released its own version of the book. Only one Technicolor still of her screen test still exists.
She retired from film acting in 1933 following three costly failures with her last film appearance being Secrets. She appeared on stage in Chicago in 1934 in the play The Church Mouse and went on tour in 1935, starting in Seattle with the stage version of Coquette. She also appeared in a season of radio plays for NBC in 1935 and CBS in 1936. In 1936, she became vice-president of United Artists and continued to produce films for others, including One Rainy Afternoon, The Gay Desperado, Sleep, My Love, and Love Happy, with the Marx Brothers.