MARY PICKFORD, THE CANADIAN QUEEN OF THE MOVIES

Gladys Louise Smith aka Mary Pickford

After an intensive night celebrating Saint John, The Grandma is exhausted. Today, she has decided to relax at home and enjoy with one of her passions, classic cinema.

The Grandma has started to watch Mary Pickford's films, masterpieces of cinema, performed by one of the greatest actresses of the cinema. The Grandma admires Mary Pickford and all the great silent film actors of her age. Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Richard Barthelmess, William Haines, John Gilbert...

On a day like today, Mary Pickford became the first female film star to sign a million-dollar contract, something amazing for a woman in this profession and in this age and The Grandma wants to homage her talking about her awesome career.

Mary Pickford is one of the greatest actresses of all times but she was also the founder of United Artists an independent cinema studio that helped actors and actresses to keep their jobs during the worst years of WWI and Post War.

Gladys Louise Smith (April 8, 1892-May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born American film actress and producer. With a career spanning 50 years, she was a co-founder of both the Pickford–Fairbanks Studio, along with Douglas Fairbanks, and, later, the United Artists film studio, with Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, and one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who present the yearly Oscar award ceremony.

Pickford was known in her prime as America's Sweetheart and the girl with the curls. She was one of the Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and a significant figure in the development of film acting. Pickford was one of the earliest stars to be billed under her own name, and was one of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, earning the nickname Queen of the Movies. She is credited as having defined the ingénue archetype in cinema.

Mary Pickford & Frances Marion

She was awarded the second ever Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound-film role in Coquette (1929) and also received an honorary Academy Award in 1976.

In consideration of her contributions to American cinema, the American Film Institute ranked Pickford as 24th in its 1999 list of greatest female stars of classic Hollywood Cinema.

Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892 at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. 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. She had two younger siblings, Charlotte -Lotti- and John Charles, who also became actors.

After being widowed in 1899, 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 Lotti, 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, destroyed by fire in 1915, rebuilt, demolished in 1931, while their mother played the organ.

More information: Mary Pickford Foundation

Pickford subsequently acted in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, finally playing the major child role in its version of The Silver King. She capped her short career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eva in the Valentine production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, adapted from the 1852 novel.

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 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 and touring the play, however, Pickford was again out of work.

Mary Pickford

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 appeared in 51 films in 1909, almost one a week. In January 1910, Pickford travelled 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 (Sweet and Twenty, They Would Elope, and To Save Her Soul, to name a few) 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). Unhappy with their creative standards, Pickford returned to work with Griffith in 1912. That year, Pickford also introduced Dorothy Gish and Lillian Gish to Griffith, and each became major silent film stars, in comedy and tragedy, respectively. Pickford made her last Biograph picture, The New York Hat, in late 1912.

More information: BBC

She returned to Broadway in the David Belasco production of A Good Little Devil (1912). In 1913, she decided to work exclusively in film.

Pickford left the stage to join Zukor's roster of stars. Zukor first filmed Pickford in a silent version of A Good Little Devil.

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 (1913), Caprice (1913), and especially Hearts Adrift (1914), 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.

Mary Pickford & Charles Chaplin

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.

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 $1,040,000 (US$ 18,130,000 in 2019).

Occasionally, she played a child, in films such as The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Daddy-Long-Legs (1919) and Pollyanna (1920).

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.

More information: Women Film Pioneers Project

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 $1,100,000. The following year, Pickford's film Little Lord Fauntleroy was also a success, and in 1923, Rosita grossed over $1,000,000 as well. During this period, she also made Little Annie Rooney (1925), another film in which Pickford played a child, Sparrows (1926), which blended the Dickensian with newly minted German expressionist style, and My Best Girl (1927), a romantic comedy featuring her future husband Buddy Rogers.

Mary Pickford

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 (1929), 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.

More information: PBS

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 released its own version of the book. Only one Technicolor still of her screen test still exists.

She retired from acting in 1933; her last acting film was released in 1934. She continued to produce for others, however, including Sleep, My Love (1948) with Claudette Colbert and Love Happy (1949), with the Marx Brothers.

Pickford used her stature in the movie industry to promote a variety of causes. Although her image depicted fragility and innocence, Pickford proved to be a worthy businesswoman who took control of her career in a cutthroat industry.

During World War I, she promoted the sale of Liberty Bonds, making an intensive series of fund-raising speeches that kicked off in Washington, D.C., where she sold bonds alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, and Marie Dressler.

Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford & Charlie Chaplin

At the end of World War I, Pickford conceived of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization to help financially needy actors. In 1932, Pickford spearheaded the Payroll Pledge Program, a payroll-deduction plan for studio workers who gave one half of one percent of their earnings to the MPRF.

As a result, in 1940, the Fund was able to purchase land and build the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, California.

An astute businesswoman, Pickford became her own producer within three years of her start in features. In 1916, Pickford's films were distributed, singly, through a special distribution unit called Artcraft. The Mary Pickford Corporation was briefly Pickford's motion-picture production company.

In 1919, she increased her power by co-founding United Artists (UA) with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her soon-to-be husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Before UA's creation, Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, not only producing films but forming chains of theaters.

United Artists broke from this tradition. It was solely a distribution company, offering independent film producers access to its own screens as well as the rental of temporarily unbooked cinemas owned by other companies.

More information: National Public Radio

Pickford and Fairbanks produced and shot their films after 1920 at the jointly owned Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The producers who signed with UA were true independents, producing, creating and controlling their work to an unprecedented degree. As a co-founder, as well as the producer and star of her own films, Pickford became the most powerful woman who has ever worked in Hollywood.

By 1930, Pickford's acting career had largely faded. After retiring three years later, however, she continued to produce films for United Artists. She and Chaplin remained partners in the company for decades. Chaplin left the company in 1955, and Pickford followed suit in 1956, selling her remaining shares for three million dollars.

Mary Pickford

After retiring from the screen, Pickford became an alcoholic, as her father had been. Her mother Charlotte died of breast cancer in March 1928. Her siblings, Lottie and Jack, both died of alcohol-related causes. These deaths, her divorce from Fairbanks, and the end of silent films left Pickford deeply depressed. Her relationship with her adopted children, Roxanne and Ronald, was turbulent at best.

Pickford withdrew and gradually became a recluse, remaining almost entirely at Pickfair and allowing visits only from Lillian Gish, her stepson Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and few other people.

Pickford believed that she had ceased to be a British subject when she married an American citizen upon her marriage to Fairbanks in 1920. Thus, she never acquired Canadian citizenship when it was first created in 1947. However, Pickford held and traveled under a British/Canadian passport which she renewed regularly at the British/Canadian consulates in Los Angeles, and she did not take out papers for American citizenship. She also owned a house in Toronto, Canada. Toward the end of her life, Pickford made arrangements with the Canadian Department of Citizenship to officially acquire Canadian citizenship because she wished to die as a Canadian. Canadian authorities were not sure that she had ever lost her Canadian citizenship, given her passport status, but her request was approved and she officially became a Canadian citizen.

On May 29, 1979, Pickford died at a Santa Monica, California, hospital of complications from a cerebral hemorrhage she had suffered the week before. She was interred in the Garden of Memory of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale, California.

More information: Mental Floss

Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter.

What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise.

I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.

Mary Pickford