Word: pickford
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...virtually invented movie stardom. It was Pickford who first kindled the wildfire of film-fan ardor; Charlie Chaplin, no doubt greater, was also later. And it was the 5-ft. pixie, known for playing cute or pathetic little girls, who first made the moguls pay huge sums for talent. "No--I really can not afford to work for only $10,000 a week," she coyly told Adolph Zukor of Famous Players in 1915, when that was real money...
...screen, Pickford was the prototype star. She had a stage mother who was her closest and only adviser (Mary faced the moneymen without an agent or manager). Though she never took director's credit, she supervised every aspect of production. When she founded United Artists with Fairbanks, Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Pickford was the one with the canniest business sense. Later she had plastic surgery, three fraught marriages, a substance-abuse problem (alcohol) and two show-biz siblings, Jack and Lottie, with a talent for scandal. Instead of ensuring iconic immortality by dying young, Mary outlived her fame, ending...
...great unknown star. If she is recalled, it is for her curls, her mansion and her second husband Douglas Fairbanks. Mary Pickford was called America's Sweetheart, but even that tribute smacks of candy samplers and crinoline, of a tintype age as remote as the Flood...
...Pickford needs to be known to see how quickly and glamorously the movies exploded into feature-length life--and at last she can be. Milestone Films has just reissued spiffy video restorations of six of Pickford's best films, made between 1917 and 1927. Mary Pickford Rediscovered (Abrams; 256 pages; $39.95), an eloquent appreciation by silent-film historian Kevin Brownlow, joins a superb biography, Eileen Whitfield's Mary Pickford: The Woman Who Made the Movies (University Press of Kentucky; 416 pages; $25), in bringing the actress alive on the page. Many of the Brownlow book's photos--evocations...
...gave as good as she got. By 1917, Hollywood was turning out features with amazingly assured pizazz; and Pickford's films, often written by Frances Marion and directed by Marshall Neilan, were the best of the bunch--fresh then, still fresh now. Engaging films like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A Little Princess and Daddy-Long-Legs strutted their effects (dream sequences, clever animation, split screen and double exposures) in the service of fables as bold as they were sweet...