Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford (born Gladys Marie Smith; Toronto, April 8, 1892-Santa Monica, May 29, 1979) was a Canadian film actress.

She was one of the greatest figures of silent cinema during the period 1915-1925 as an interpreter of a popular type of romantic ingenue and thus became the most powerful and best-paid actress at that time, the first great Hollywood star. Among the American public she became known as "Little Mary," "The Girl with the Golden Hair," and America's First Sweetheart. ».

Biography

Early years

Mary Pickford was born Gladys Marie Smith in 1892 (although she later stated 1893 or 1894 as the year of birth) at 211 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. Her father, John Charles Smith, was a son of English Methodist immigrants and did various odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was of Irish Catholic descent and worked for a time as a seamstress. She had two little brothers, both actors: Charlotte, called & # 34; Lottie Pickford & # 34; (born 1893), and Jack Pickford (born 1896). To please her husband's relatives, Pickford's mother baptized her children Methodists, the religion of her father. John Charles Sr. he was an alcoholic; He abandoned the family and died on February 11, 1898 from a fatal blood clot caused by a work accident when he was a purser on the Niagara Steamship.

When Gladys was four years old, her home was under infectious quarantine as a public health measure. Her devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother (Catherine Faeley Hennessey) asked a visiting Catholic priest to baptize the children. Pickford was then baptized Gladys Marie Smith.

After becoming a widow in 1899, Charlotte Smith began taking in boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, stage manager of the Cummings Stock Company, who soon suggested that Gladys, then aged seven, and Lottie, who was six at the time, played two small stage roles: Gladys played a girl and a boy, while Lottie appeared in a silent role in the company's production of The Silver King at the Princess Theatre. of Toronto (destroyed by fire in 1915, rebuilt and demolished in 1931), while his mother played the organ. Pickford later appeared in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, eventually playing the lead child role in their version of The Silver King. He culminated his short career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eve in Valentine's production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, an adaptation of the 1852 novel.

Soon, little Gladys became a success, under the name Baby Gladys. Mary Pickford early developed a risky and depressive personality marked by the death of her father. This would affect her entire life.

Acting development

At the age of fifteen, the young woman traveled alone to New York to ask for a job from David Belasco, producer of successful Broadway plays, and she got it. It was the summer of 1907 when she, along with Belasco, decided to change her name to Mary Pickford for her theater work, but she soon discovered film. Curious about the new art, she was hired by Biograph Studios, the studio of David Wark Griffith, and she debuted in the 1909 film The Violin Maker of Cremona.

Additionally, he made various short films, in many of which he shared the lead role with Owen Moore. This was her first husband, in 1911, when they secretly married.

Ambitious, she soon began to gain fame and demand that her name appear on screen. Already in 1914 she was earning more than $100,000 annually, and in 1915 she had her own production company, the Mary Pickford Famous Players Company.

The initial flirtation with cinema while working with Belasco was reversed, and in a few years Mary became "America's sweetheart", and the first actress with admirers throughout the world, thanks to her roles as a poor girl with funny ringlets - she looked younger than she actually was.

The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), both in 1917 were his first successes as feature films.

On April 17, 1919, Mary Pickford, along with Charles Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and her future husband Douglas Fairbanks founded United Artists, a film production company that endures today.

It was around this time that she fell in love with Douglas Fairbanks, a successful actor famous for his roles as an adventurous heartthrob, married with a son, causing their relationship a real impact on public opinion, so they married on March 28, 1920 after obtaining their respective divorces.

Among his most resounding hits are Papaíto Piernas Largas (Daddy Long Legs) and Almas de la Cumbre (Heart O& #39;the Hills), in 1919, Dream and Reality (Suds) in 1920, By the Service Gate (Through the Back Door) and The Little Lord (Little Lord Fauntleroy) in 1921, and Tess in Storm Country (Tess of the Storm Country) in 1922.

The type of character she created, firmly anchored in Victorian melodrama, is totally foreign to the sensitivity of today's viewer, but at the time she won the favor of a neophyte and basically rural audience by combining the identification of women with a character in which idealism was allied with the value and attractiveness of men towards that intermediate region between asexual childhood and buxom femininity that constituted an erotic prototype of the beginning of the century.

In 1923 his income rose to over a million dollars annually, which at the time was a sky-high figure. Her power was absolute, controlling every last detail of her films conceived as vehicles for her and even hiring the most famous German director, Ernst Lubitsch, to direct her in the film Rosita La Cantante Callejera (Rosita) in 1923.

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks formed the most famous film couple of their time, although they only appeared together in one film: The Taming of the Shrew, in 1929.

Their careers continued to be meteoric, although Mary's mental problems were beginning to become known throughout Hollywood, especially when Charlotte, the actress's mother, died in 1928, and she sank into a state of depression.

After the death of her mother, Mary decided to abandon her roles as a poor orphan, cut her ringlets and spent a year without working, the first of her entire career. Her next film, Coqueta in 1929, was the first sound film and a radical change in her work. Thanks to her, she won the second Oscar since its founding, awarded in the history of sound films for Best Actress.

This film, paradoxically, caused a rapid decline in her popularity by revealing her limitations as an actress and proving that her fans were not willing to accept an evolution of her character from a naive victim to more adult characters.

Later, he only worked on three other sound films, the last being Secrets in 1933.

Did you mean: Su matrimonio con Douglas Fairbanks se desmorona también hasta que finalmente se divorciaron en el año de 1936.

He was also the lover of Ernst Udet, famous German pilot, World War I ace and aircraft designer.

Due to the death of her brother Jack Pickford and that of her mother, they had created a state of absolute depression in her, increased by the dramatic death of her little sister, Lottie Pickford, in 1936.

She herself was perfectly aware of the expiration of her image and her unique and unrepeatable position as the pinnacle of an entire industry in consolidation, undergoing a retirement only comparable to that of the actress Greta Garbo. Several sources claim that she was one of the actresses considered by Billy Wilder for the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, but Wilder discarded her because her character did not fit his character. It is also said that she received the director in a state of intoxication, which is why she was not seen in a position to start filming.

Increasingly secluded in her mansion, and after more than two hundred films, she devoted herself to production, first as vice president of United Artists and then as an independent producer until 1956, but she never acted in any other film again.

On June 24, 1937, she married Charles Rogers, twelve years younger and with whom she would adopt, in 1943, two children: Ronald and Roxanne.

Since 1965, after attending the tribute paid to her by the French Cinematheque, she lived in seclusion with her husband and children in Pickfair Manor, the famous mansion in Beverly Hills that owes its name to the contraction of the surnames Pickford and Fairbanks, receiving only very few visits from his friends. She had barely left this mansion in recent years, confining herself mainly to her bedroom.

He even went so far as to demand that all his preserved films be destroyed. From the above, she mentioned the following: "For the same reason that I left the cinema, so that what would happen to me would not happen to me like Chaplin, who when he dispensed with his vagabond character, he turned against him and killed him, I now want to get rid of some films that have already fulfilled their function. Time passes, and the public will compare me with modern actresses, and I want to prevent this from happening".

However, no such destruction took place. The Mary Pickford Foundation invested around $200,000 in recovering and restoring negatives and making prints of 29 feature films and 28 short films, while the United States Library of Congress received the donation of 51 short films.

In 1976 he was awarded a special Oscar Award "for his contribution to the film industry".

On May 29, 1979, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a room at the Santa Monica Hospital, at the age of 87, after having fallen into alcoholism and having lived for decades in total seclusion.

The film industry

Pickford used his position in the film industry to promote various causes. Although her image reflected fragility and innocence, she proved to be a strong business woman who took the reins of her career in a cutthroat industry.

During World War I he promoted the sale of 'Freedom Bonds', giving an intense series of speeches to raise funds, beginning in Washington, D.C., where he sold bonds with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara and Marie Dressler. Five days later she spoke on Wall Street before about 50,000 people. Although she was born in Canada, she was a powerful symbol of American culture, kissing the American flag for the cameras and auctioning off one of her world-famous curls for $15,000. In a single speech in Chicago, she sold an estimated $5 million worth of bonds. She was baptized as the "Little Sister" US Navy officer; The Army named two cannons after her and named her an honorary colonel.

In 1916, Pickford and Constance Adams Demille, wife of director Cecil B. Demille, helped to found the Hollywood Studio Club, a residence for young women involved in the cinema business. At the end of World War I He conceived the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization to financially help the needy actors. The leftover funds of his work selling Liberty bonds were allocated to their creation and, in 1921, the cinema aid fund (MPRF) was officially established, with Joseph Schenck as the first president and Pickford as vice president. In 1932, Pickford led the " Payroll Pledge Program ", a payroll deduction plan for the workers of the studies that donated half of the one percent of their income to the MPRF. As a result, in 1940, the fund was able to buy land and build the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, California.

Pickford, a cunning business woman, became her own producer three years after starting working in the cinema. According to its foundation, " supervised all aspects of the realization of its films, from the hiring of talent and the team to the supervision of the script, the filming, the assembly, the final launch and the promotion of each project " He demanded (and obtained) these powers in 1916, when it was hired by Famous Players in Famous Play de Zukor (later Paramount). Zukor agreed to his refusal to participate in the " Block-booking ", a very widespread practice that consisted of forcing an exhibitor to project a bad film chosen by the studio to also be able to project a Pickford movie. In 1916, Pickford films were distributed individually through a special distribution unit called Artcraft. The Mary Pickford Corporation was briefly the cinematographic producer of Pickford.

In 1919, she increased her power by co-founding United Artists (UA) with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her future husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Before the creation of UA, Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, not only producing films but forming chains of cinemas. The distributors (who were also part of the studios) were responsible for ensuring that the company's productions were shown in the company's theaters. Filmmakers relied on studios to book movies; in exchange, they endured what many considered creative interference.

United Artists broke with this tradition. It was solely a distribution company, offering independent film producers access to their own screens, as well as the rental of temporarily unreserved movie theaters owned by other companies. Pickford and Fairbanks produced and shot their films after 1920 at Pickford and Fairbanks' joint studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The producers who signed with UA were truly independents, producing, creating and controlling their work to an unprecedented degree. As co-founder, as well as producer and star of her own films, Pickford became the most powerful woman to ever work in Hollywood. By 1930, Pickford's acting career had largely faded, however, after retiring from it three years later, she continued producing 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 his remaining shares for $3 million.

He had purchased the rights to many of his early silent films with the intention of burning them upon his death, but in 1970 he agreed to donate 50 of his Biograph films to the American Film Institute. In 1976, he received an Honorary Award from the Academy for his contribution to American cinema.

Presence at film festivals

In March 1954, Mary Pickford attended the first Mar del Plata International Film Festival (held at the imposing "Hotel Provincial" - Mar del Plata, Argentina), becoming one of the most popular figures and receiving numerous expressions of affection from the public and colleagues.

Partial filmography

• Mrs. Jones Entertains - 1909
• The Light That Came - 1909
• Ramona - 1910
• The Unchanging Sea - 1910
• Red Riding Hood - 1911
• The Mender of Nets - 1912
• Cinderella - 1914
• The poor girl Rica - 1917
• Rebecca the one from the sun farm - 1917
• The Little Princess - 1917
• An romance in the Redwoods - 1917
• The Little American - 1917
• Stella Maris - 1918
• Santa Piernas Largas - 1919
• Pollyanna - 1920
• Little Lord Fauntleroy - 1921
• The eccentric - 1921
• Tess in the country of storms - 1923
• Rosita, the street singer - 1923
• Little Anita - 1925
• Gorrions - 1926
• My Favorite Girl - 1927
• The Gaucho - 1927
• The domaid clay - 1929
• Coquette - 1929
• Secrets - 1933

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Year	Category	Movie	Outcome
1929	Best actress	Cottage	Winner
1976	Honorary Oscar		Winner