Word: pickford
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...study. No spicy food is on the menu for the time being. The other night the Reagans watched a video reel given to them by a Hollywood veteran and friend, Ken Murray. The scenes were from his home movies collected over decades and showed the greats, like Mary Pickford, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable at play...
...seen in a magazine was on your mind. You wondered if you wanted to see Maude Adams in her return engagement as Peter Pan. Or perhaps brave the odors and chatter of the nickelodeon to catch that spunky new girl--her name, unpublicized at the time, was Mary Pickford--people were talking about in Ramona...
...Most of Pickford's films were parables of class and money: the poor colliding with, and educating, the rich. They shrank neither from the audacious depiction of adult brutality to children nor from the optimism that gave a climactic absolution to the misery that preceded it. Translating her youth into melodrama, Pickford usually played the poor, plucky waif; she suffered for her poverty (she was beaten, scalded, whipped) and, in Stella Maris, she died for it. Like Dickens, Pickford wed sentiment to social passion and created enduring popular...
When she married Fairbanks in 1920, the two reigned as Hollywood's king and queen in their legendary home, Pickfair. He was the athletic bon vivant, she the gracious princess. But the poetic silent picture was replaced by the prosaic talkie, and Pickford was finally too old for her girlish grit to be convincing. She made her last film in 1933 at 40, and within a few years Jack, Lottie and Doug were dead. Bereft, she quietly drank herself to oblivion, pickled in Pickfair. By her death in 1979, only a few oldsters could recall Little Mary with anything like...
...with Pickford's instructive life and surpassing art again available for appraisal, we can begin to appreciate the impact of the movies' first star--her gift and her curse...