Mary Pickford
America's Sweetheart on screen, and one of the four who founded United Artists off it.
Gladys Louise Smith, working as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian American actress and producer whose Hollywood career spanned five decades. She was among the most popular actresses of the silent era and among the most powerful people in the industry at the same time.
The second half matters more than the publicity ever admitted. Pickford co-founded United Artists, produced her own pictures and negotiated contracts that no other performer of the period could get.
Her screen image was of a girl with ringlets. Her business record was of an executive.
Her negotiating record is precise enough to date. She began with D. W. Griffith at Biograph in 1909 at ten dollars a day. On June 24, 1916, she signed with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players for $10,000 a week, half the profits of each picture and a guarantee of just over a million dollars, with authority over her own productions. The four founders of United Artists in 1919 were Pickford, Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Griffith, and she outlasted the other three in the company, selling her final holding for $3 million in 1956. In 1927 she was one of the 36 founders of the Academy.
The curls were a professional asset and she treated them that way. She played children and adolescents well into her thirties, Pollyanna in 1920, both mother and son in Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1921, and her attempts at adult roles, Rosita in 1923 among them, did not shift the public's view. When she cut her hair in 1928, after her mother's death, the New York Times put it on the front page. Coquette in 1929, her first talking picture, showed the bob and won her the Academy Award. She had planned to have her early films burned. Instead she gave 50 Biograph titles to the American Film Institute in 1970.
Facts on this file are checked against the Wikipedia article Mary Pickford. The wording is ours. Nothing about the photograph is asserted beyond the credit the file itself carries, and that credit is usually a studio rather than a person: stills departments were staff jobs and the photographer's name went unrecorded. Confident attributions in the trade are mostly inherited guesses.
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About Mary Pickford
How did Mary Pickford die
A cerebral haemorrhage. She suffered it in the last week of May 1979 at Pickfair and died in hospital in Santa Monica on May 29, aged eighty seven. By then she had been effectively housebound for more than a decade, receiving even old friends by telephone from her bedroom and drinking heavily; the Academy had come to the house to film her acceptance of an honorary award in 1976 rather than ask her to attend. She was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale, with her mother, brother and sister.
Was Mary Pickford married to Douglas Fairbanks
They married on March 28, 1920, weeks after her Nevada divorce from Owen Moore, and the press called it the marriage of the century. The house they built in Beverly Hills was named Pickfair and became the address in Hollywood; visiting royalty went there. Fairbanks began an affair with Sylvia Ashley in the early 1930s and the divorce was final on January 10, 1936. Pickford married Charles Buddy Rogers, an actor and bandleader twelve years younger, on June 24, 1937, and stayed married to him until her death.
Did Mary Pickford win an Oscar
She won Best Actress for Coquette at the second Academy Awards, presented in April 1930, for her first talking picture. The choice was disputed then and since: she was a founder of the Academy, had entertained the judges at Pickfair, and the performance is not among her best. A second, honorary, award came in 1976 for her contribution to the industry. The Academy filmed the acceptance at the house because she would not leave it.
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