Mary Pickford

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Gladys Louise Smith (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979), better known as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born American film actress and producer.

Pickford was a co-founder of both the Pickford–Fairbanks Studio (long with Douglas Fairbanks) and, later, the United Artists film studio (with Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith) and one of the original 36 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who host the annual "Oscar" award ceremony in her 50 years, as the "girl with the curls" and the "girl with the curls."

She was one of the pioneers of early Hollywood and a central figure in film production.

Pickford was one of the first celebrities to be credited under her own name and was one of the twentieth and twentieth century's most popular actresses, earning the affection "Queen of the Movies."

She has been named as the pioneer of cinema ingénue archetype. She was nominated for the second time by the Academy Awards for her first sound-film role in Coquette (1929) and later received an honorary Academy Award in 1976.

The American Film Institute named Pickford 24th in its 1999 list of the top female stars of classic Hollywood Cinema, owing to her contribution to American cinema.

Early life

Gladys Marie Smith was born in 1892 (although she later claimed 1893 or 1894 as her year of birth) at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. John Charles Smith, his father, was born in England and migrated to a variety of odd occupations. Charlotte Hennessey, a mother of Irish Catholic descent, worked as a seamstress for a time. Charlotte Pickford's two younger siblings were billed as "Lottie Pickford" (born 1893), and John Charles Jr. "Jack Pickford" (born 1896). Pickford's mother baptized her children as Methodists, according to their father's faith. Snr. John Charles Snr. He was an alcoholic, and he died on February 11, 1898, after he was a purser with Niagara Steamship.

Gladys' household was infected with infectious disease as a public health intervention at four years old. The children's devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother (Catherine Faeley Hennessey) begged a visiting Roman Catholic priest to baptize them. Pickford was baptized as Gladys Marie Smith at this time.

Charlotte Smith, who died in 1899, started taking boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, the company's stage manager, and later suggested that Gladys, then aged seven, and Lottie, then six, be portrayed as adults, while Lottie was playing the organ. Pickford appeared in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, finally playing the major child in the company's version of The Silver King. She rounded off her brief time in Toronto by playing Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was based on the 1852 novel.

Personal life

Pickford has been married three times. Owen Moore, an Irish-born silent film actor, married her on January 7, 1911. It is believed she became pregnant by Moore in the early 1910s and had a miscarriage or abortion. According to some, this resulted in her later inability to have children. Moore's alcoholism, insecurity about being in the shadow of Pickford's fame, and bouts of domestic strife all soured the couple's marriage. The couple used to work together on and off for many years.

Pickford was discovered to be involved in a mystery with Douglas Fairbanks. In 1918, they toured the United States to promote Liberty Bond sales for the World War I campaign. Pickford also suffered from the flu during the 1918 influenza pandemic around this time. Pickford divorced Moore on March 2, 1920, after she agreed to his $100,000 settlement ($1.4 million in 2021, adjusted for inflation). Fairbanks married Fairbanks just days later, in what was described as the "marriage of the century" and they were referred to as the King and Queen of Hollywood. Fans in London and Paris riotked over the famous couple's arrival in Europe for their honeymoon. Hundreds of people turned out to hail the couple at train stations around the country, celebrating their triumphant return to Hollywood.

The Mark of Zorro (1920) and a slew of other swashbucklers gave the Fairbanks a more romantic, heroic image. Pickford continued to epitomize the virtuous but fiery girl next door. People erupted when Pickford appeared in a room; she and her husband were often referred to as "Hollywood royalty." Their international reputations were extensive. Foreign heads of state and dignitaries who visited the White House often asked if they could also visit Pickfair, the couple's mansion in Beverly Hills, while others waited for hours.

Pickfair's dinners have since become well-known. Fairbanks' best friend, Charlie Chaplin, was often on hand. Among other guests were George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Elinor Glyn, Helen Keller, H.G. Wells, Fritz Kreisler, Amelia Earhart, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matt. Conan Doyle, Baron Nishi, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Austen Chamberlain, Sir Harry Lauder, and Meher Baba. However, Pickford's second marriage brought it to a breaking point. Both she and Fairbanks had no time off from directing and acting in their films. They were also on display as America's unofficial ambassadors to the world, leading parades, cutting ribbons, and giving addresses. Fairbanks' reticular nature led him to travel throughout the silent period (something Pickford did not enjoy). Fairbanks and Pickford broke apart in the early 1930s when Fairbanks' relationship with Sylvia, Lady Ashley became known. They divorced on January 10, 1936. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Fairbanks' son, and Pickford's father also expressed regret for their inability to reconcile long ago.

Pickford married her third and last husband, actress and band leader Charles "Buddy" Rogers on June 24, 1937. They adopted two children, Roxanne (born 1944, adopted 1944) and Ronald Charles (born 1937, adopted 1943, a.k.a. Ronnie Pickford Rogers (Ronnie Pickford Rogers). Pickford's ties with her children were described as tense in a PBS American Experience documentary. Ronnie's petite stature and Roxanne's crooked teeth were among their physical features criticized by the singer. Both children's mother later said that they were too self-absorbed to provide genuine maternal care. "Things didn't work out so well," Ronnie recalled in 2003. But I'll never forget her. "I think she was a lovely woman."

Pickford endorsed Thomas Dewey in the 1944 United States presidential election, Barry Goldwater in the 1964 United States presidential election, and Ronald Reagan in his bid for governor in 1966.

Pickford became an alcoholic after resigning from television as her father was a alcoholic. Charlotte died of breast cancer in March 1928. Lottie and Jack, and her siblings, died of alcohol-related ailments in 1936 and 1933, respectively. Pickford was deeply distraught by these deaths, her separation from Fairbanks, and the demise of silent films. Roxanne and Ronald's relationship with her adopted children, although not always happy. Pickford rescised and became a recluse, spending almost entirely at Pickfair and not allowing visits from Lillian Gish, her stepson Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and a few others.

Sunshine and Shadows, she began in 1955, she published her memoirs. My Rendevouz of Life (1935), an essay on death and her participation in an afterlife, as well as a memoir in 1935, The Demidow. In a matter relating to her co-ownership of North Carolina television station WSJS-TV, she appeared in court in 1959. Pickford replied, "I'm 21, going on 20," when asked to tell her age.

Pickford used to receive visitors only by telephone in the mid-1960s, often speaking to them from their bedroom. Visitors were often guided around Pickfair, including photos of a true western bar that Pickford had acquired for Douglas Fairbanks, as well as a portrait of Pickford in the drawing room. In the Library of Congress, a print of this photograph now hangs. The Academy sent a television crew to film Pickford's brief statement of thanks in 1976, giving the public a rare glimpse into Pickfair Manor. A annual Christmas party for blind war veterans from World War I was held at Pickfair.

Pickford, an American citizen, thought she had ceased to be a British subject when she married Fairbanks, an American citizen, in 1920. She did not obtain Canadian citizenship when it was first granted in 1947. Pickford maintained and traveled under a British/Canadian passport, which she renewed regularly at the British/Canadian consulates in Los Angeles, but she did not take out papers for American citizenship. She also owned a house in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Pickford made arrangements with the Canadian Department of Citizenship to officially obtain Canadian citizenship towards the end of her life because she wished to "die as a Canadian." Authorities in Canada were not sure she had ever lost her Canadian citizenship, despite her passport number, but her request was accepted and she officially became a Canadian citizen.

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

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Career

Theatre had become a family business by the early 1900s. Gladys, her mother, and two younger siblings toured the United States by rail, appearing in third-rate companies and plays. Pickford allowed one more summer to land a leading role on Broadway, despite her plans to leave acting if she failed. Chauncey Olcott was supported on Broadway by Gladys, Lottie, and Jack Smith in 1906. Gladys were finally cast in The Warrens of Virginia, a 1907 Broadway play. William C. deMille, Cecil's brother, appeared in the role, was the author of the play. Gladys Smith's stage name Mary Pickford was requested by David Belasco, the play's producer. Pickford was still out of work after completing the Broadway run and touring the play, but he was still looking for a job.

D. W. Griffith, the Biograph Company's director, screen-tested her at the company's New York studio on April 19, 1909, for a role in the nickelodeon film Pippa Passes. Griffith was transferred to another person, but Pickford took him straight away. She figured out that movie acting was much simpler than stage acting of the day. The majority of Biograph actors earned $5 a day, but Griffith decided to pay Pickford $10 a day against a promise of $40 a week.

Pickford, like all actors at Biograph, played both bit parts and lead roles, including mothers, ingenues, charwomen, slaves, Native Americans, and a prostitute. Pickford reflected on her Biograph as she spoke: "She's been successful at Biograph."

She appeared in 51 films in 1909, almost one a week, in her first leading role in The Violin Maker of Cremona opposite future husband Owen Moore. While at Biograph, she told Florence La Badie to "try pictures," invited her to the studio, and later introduced her to D. W. Griffith, who began La Badie's career.

Pickford and a Biograph crew travelled to Los Angeles in January 1910. Many other film companies stayed on the west coast, escaping the poor light and short days that prevented winter shooting in the East. Pickford began her 1909 Biographs (Sweet and Twenty, They Will Elope, and To Save Her Soul) with California films.

Actors were not included in the company's credits. Pickford was identified by Audiences within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors, in turn, profited from her publicity by announcing on sandwich boards that a film starring "The Girl with the Golden Curls," "Blondilocks," or "The Biograph Girl" was inside, was included.

In December 1910, Pickford left Biograph. She appeared in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company for the next year (IMP). In 1912, the IMP and Majestic were absorbed into Universal Pictures, as well as Majestic. Pickford returned to Griffith in 1912 to work with them, unhappy with their creative ambitions. Friends, The Mender of Nets, Just Like a Woman, and The Female of the Species were among her best performances in his films. Dorothy and Lillian Gish, who had befriended as new residents from Ohio, were introduced in Griffith that year, and they went from there to Griffith, where they became top silent film stars in comedy and tragedy. In late 1912, Pickford took her last Biograph photograph, The New York Hat.

In the David Belasco production of A Good Little Devil (1912), she returned to Broadway. This was a turning point in her career. Pickford, who had always aspired to rule Broadway, discovered how much she adored film acting. She began working exclusively in film in 1913. Adolph Zukor had formed Famous Players in Famous Plays in the previous year. Famous Players-Lasky and then Paramount Pictures, one of the first American film companies, were later identified as Famous Players-Lasky and then Paramount Pictures.

Pickford left the stage to join Zukor's cast list of actors. Zukor believed in filming dramatic actors in recreations of their most well-known stage roles and productions. In a silent version of A Good Little Devil, Zukor first filmed Pickford. The film, which was released in 1913, featured every line of dialogue, resulting in a tense film that Pickford later described as "one of the worst [features] I ever made — it was deadly." Zukor understood; the film was held back from release for a year.

Pickford's work in camera-generated content by that time had a large following. 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 requested the first of her many publicized pay raises based on her results and study. Pickford's name appeared above the title on movie marquees for the first time. Tess of the Storm Country was announced five weeks later. Kevin Brownlow, a biographer, said the film "launched her career into orbit and made her the most popular actress in America, if not the world."

By the February 1916 issue of Photoplay as "luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity," she was summed up two years later. Only Charlie Chaplin, who barely surpassed Pickford's fame in 1916, had a spellbinding pull with critics and the audience. Each had a far greater fame than any other actors. Pickford was considered the world's most popular woman in the 1910s and 1920s, or, as a silent film journalist, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman in history.

Pickford appeared in 52 films throughout her career. Pickford signed a new deal with Zukor on June 24, 1916, giving her complete control over the film's production and casting, as well as a record-breaking salary of $10,000 a week. Pickford's compensation was half of a film's earnings, with a promise of $1,040,000 (US$19,600,000 in 2022), making her the first actress to sign a million dollar contract. She has also served as vice president of Pickford Film Corporation.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), and Pollyanna (1920) were among her children in films such as The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). Pickford's followers were devoted to these "little girl" roles, but they were not typical of her career. She loved photographing these images due to her lack of a normal childhood. Given how small she was and her naturalistic acting abilities, she was extremely successful in these roles. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who first saw her in person as a child, assumed she was a new playmate for him and begged her to come and ride trains with him, which she obligingly did.

Pickford's employment ended in August 1918, and she was given $250,000 to leave the motion picture industry after rejecting Zukor's terms for a new one. She turned down the opportunity and went to First National Pictures, which agreed to her terms. Pickford, D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks formed United Artists, a British film production firm founded in 1919. Pickford continued to produce and perform in her own films through United Artists; she also had the ability to sell them as she desired. Pickford's film Pollyanna grossed around $1,100,000. Pickford's film Little Lord Fauntleroy was also a hit, and Rosita's 1923 debut in 1923, the same amount. Little Annie Rooney (1925), another film in which Pickford appeared as a child, Sparrows (1926), a German expressionist film starring her future husband Charles "Buddy" Rogers, was released during this time.

The sound of her voice was her undoing. Pickford discounted the benefits of adding sound to movies, saying that "adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo."

In Coquette (1929), her first talkie, she was the subject of a lady whose infamous ringlets were turned into a 1920s' bob. Pickford had already cut her hair in the aftermath of her mother's death in 1928. The change stunned followers. Pickford's hair had long been a symbol of female virtue, and when she chopped it, the act made front-page news in The New York Times and other newspapers. Despite being highly contested, Coquette had a blast and received the Academy Award for Best Actress. In the more complex roles, the public was unable to respond to her. Pickford, like many movie stars of the silent era, saw her career fading as talkies became more popular among viewers.

The Taming of The Shrew, her husband Douglas Fairbanks' film, was not well received at the box office. The impending arrival of the talkies had sparked a lot of anxiety among veteran Hollywood actors. Fairbanks, Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, President John Barrymore, D. W. Griffith, and Dolores del R.O. were among the performers on Wednesday. They appeared on the radio show to prove that they were up for discussing films.

Pickford made a change in the roles when she was in her late 30s, no longer able to perform the children, teenage spitfires, and feisty young women so beloved by her fans, but not those of early sound's glamorous and vain heroines. Alice in Wonderland, she underwent a Technicolor screen test, but Walt Disney dropped the attempt when Paramount released its own version of the story. Only one Technicolor of her screen test is still exists.

Following three costly losses, she resigned from film acting in 1933, when her last film appearance was Secrets. She appeared on stage in Chicago in 1934's play The Church Mouse and went on tour in 1935, beginning in Seattle with the stage version of Coquette. In 1935 and 1936, she appeared in a season of radio plays for NBC and CBS. She became vice president of United Artists in 1936 and went on to produce films for others, including One Rainy Afternoon (1936), Sleep, My Love (1948), with Claudette Colbert), and Love Happy (1949), with the Marx Brothers.

Pickford promoted a number of causes thanks to her work in film. Despite the fact that her image represented fragility and innocence, she continued to be an excellent businesswoman who took charge of her career in a cutthroat industry.

During World War II, she advocated for the selling of Liberty Bonds, beginning in Washington, D.C., where she sold bonds alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, and Marie Dressler. She appeared on Wall Street to an estimated 50,000 viewers five days later. Despite being born in Canada, she was a pillar of American history, kissing the American flag on film and selling one of her world-famous curls for $15,000. She sold an estimated five million dollars worth of bonds in a single address in Chicago. She was christened the United States Navy's official "Little Sister"; the Army named two cannons after her and made her an honorary colonel.

Pickford and Constance Adams DeMille, wife of director Cecil B. DeMille, helped establish the Hollywood Studio Club, a dormitory for young women involved in the motion picture industry in 1916. Pickford developed the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an initiative to assist financially disadvantaged actors at the start of World War I. Leftover funds from her previous work selling Liberty Bonds were put toward its establishment, and in 1921, the Motion Picture Relief Fund (MPRF) was officially established, with Joseph Schenck naming its first president and Pickford its vice president. Pickford pioneered the "Payroll Pledge Scheme," a wage-deduction scheme for studio employees that gave one-quarter of their income to the MPRF in 1932. As a result, the Fund was able to purchase property and design the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, in 1940.

Pickford, an astute businesswoman, became a sole producer within three years of her debut in films. "She oversaw every part of her films, from recruiting talent and crew to directing the script, the film, and the final presentation and promotion of each project," her Foundation says. When she was under a tenancy to Zukor's Famous Players in Famous Plays, she demanded (and received) these rights in 1916. (later Zukor resigned from participating in block-booking, the common practice of requesting an exhibitor to show a poor film of the studio's choice to also include a Pickford film. Pickford's films were released in 1916, singly, by a special distribution unit called Artcraft. Pickford's motion-picture production firm, the Mary Pickford Corporation, was briefly represented by the Margaret Pickford Corporation.

She rose her fame in 1919 by co-founding United Artists (UA), alongside Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks, her soon-to-be husband. Hollywood studios were vertically integrated before UA's inception, not only producing films but also creating theater chains. Company representatives (and members of the studios) had arranged for company films to be seen in the company's movie theaters. Filmmakers relied on bookings from the studios; in return, they were rewarded with what many people regarded as creative meddling.

Artists in the United Kingdom broke with this period. It was merely a distribution company, providing independent film makers with access to its own screens as well as the rental of partially vacant cinemas owned by other companies. Pickford and Fairbanks produced and shot their films after 1920 at the jointly owned Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The producers who joined UA were true independents, designing, producing, and governing their work to an unprecedented degree. Pickford, a co-founder and producer of her own films, went on to be Hollywood's most influential woman. Pickford's acting career had largely faded by 1930. She left three years later, but United Artists filmmaker Sharon Carter continued to make films. For decades, She and Chaplin have been partners in the firm. Chaplin left the company in 1955, and Pickford followed suit in 1956, selling her remaining shares for $3 million.

She had purchased the rights to several of her early silent films with the intention of destroying them on her death, but in 1970 she agreed to donate 50 of her Biograph films to the American Film Institute. She received an Academy Award in 1976 for her contribution to American cinema.

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