Gladys Louise Smith (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979), baptised as Gladys Marie Smith, known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian American film actress and producer. A pioneer in the American film industry with a Hollywood career spanning five decades, Pickford was one of the most popular actresses of the silent film era. Beginning her film career in 1909, Pickford became Hollywood's first millionaire by 1916, and, at the height of her career, had complete creative control of her films and was one of the most recognizable women in the world. Due to her popularity, unprecedented international fame, and success as an actress and businesswoman, she was known as the "Queen of the Movies". She was a significant figure in the development of film acting and is credited with having defined the type in cinema, a persona that also earned her the nickname "America's Sweetheart".
In 1919, she co-founded United Artists alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith, and was also one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. She was awarded the second Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound film role in Coquette (1929) and received an Academy Honorary Award in 1976 in consideration of her contributions to American cinema. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Pickford as the 24th-greatest female star of Classical Hollywood Cinema.
Early life
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892, at 211 (later 561) University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, at Victoria Hospital, renamed the Hospital for Sick Children in 1951. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of English Methodist immigrants, and worked a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was of Irish Catholic descent and worked for a time as a seamstress. Pickford had two younger siblings, both actors. Charlotte was billed as "Lottie Pickford" (born 1893), and John Charles Jr. was billed as "Jack Pickford" (born 1896). To please her husband's relatives, Pickford's mother baptized her children as Methodists, the religion of their father. John Charles Sr. was an alcoholic. He died on February 11, 1898, from a fatal blood clot caused by a workplace accident when he was a purser with Niagara Steamship. Her father's death when Mary was five, was accompanied by her mother's screams, a traumatic event Mary would relive throughout her life. It traumatized young Mary so much that she did not attend school and did not learn to read as a child.
The house was situated in a poor district of Toronto known as "The Ward" where disease was prevalent. When Gladys was four years old, her household was under infectious quarantine as a public health measure. Their devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother (Catherine Faeley Hennessey) asked a visiting Roman Catholic priest to baptize the children. Pickford was at this time baptized as Gladys Marie Smith. Gladys attended McCaul School on University Avenue.
After being widowed in 1898, Charlotte Smith began taking in boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, the theatrical stage manager for Cummings Stock Company, who soon suggested that Gladys, then age seven, and Lottie, then age six, be given two small theatrical roles—Gladys portrayed a girl and a boy, while Lottie was cast in a silent part in the company's production of The Silver King at Toronto's Princess Theatre (destroyed by fire in 1915, rebuilt, demolished in 1931), while their mother played the organ. Pickford subsequently acted in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company, ultimately playing the major child role in its version of The Silver King. She concluded her early career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eva in the Valentine production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, adapted from the 1852 novel.
Career Early years
In 1901, the family moved to the United States to pursue theatre as a family enterprise. The family joined the travelling company of The Fatal Wedding. 'Baby Gladys Smith' had the lead child role as the Little Mother, Lottie was her understudy, Jack had a small role, and Charlotte was a French maid. Gladys, her mother, and two younger siblings toured the United States by rail, performing in third-rate companies and plays. Life was one of poverty on Gladys' income, with Gladys helping her mother care for her younger siblings. Gladys learned to read and write through some school primers Charlotte bought, and received no formal schooling. On some tours, Charlotte and Jack would perform in one company, and Gladys and Lottie in another. Charlotte arranged for her daughters to be cared for by troupe members. It was during this time that the Smiths would become friends with another show family, Mary Gish and her two daughters Lillian and Dorothy.
In 1905, she played the boy Freckles in Hal Reid's The Gypsy Girl on tour, and at the Star Theatre on Broadway. In 1906, Gladys, Lottie, and Jack Smith supported singer Chauncey Olcott on Broadway in Edmund Burke.
Living in New York City, Gladys pursued the successful Broadway producer David Belasco at his office for months. Eventually Belasco relented and auditioned Gladys for a child role in the 1907 Broadway play The Warrens of Virginia. Belasco hired her for the part at per week, but was unhappy with her name for the stage. He liked her middle name and for a last name chose Gladys' maternal grandmother's last name Pickford. Mary Pickford became her permanent stage name. The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, Cecil, appeared in the cast. After completing its Broadway run, the play toured, including a stop in her hometown of Toronto. It played at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in January 1909.
In 1909, her savings from the Broadway production ran out, and at her mother's suggestion to try getting a part in a motion picture, she went to the Biograph Company studio in New York, not expecting any success to come of it. On April 19, 1909, Biograph director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her for a role in the nickelodeon film Pippa Passes. The role went to someone else, but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford. She quickly grasped that movie acting was simpler than the stylized stage acting of the day. Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day, but after Pickford's single day in the studio, Griffith agreed to pay her $10 a day on a $40-a-week guarantee. Pickford made her first film appearance in Her First Biscuits, filmed the next day. Pickford only appears in the seven-minute film near the end, but stands out in her white dress amongst the cast of actors.
Pickford, like all actors at Biograph, played both leading roles and bit parts, including mothers, ingénues, charwomen, spitfires, slaves, Native Americans, spurned women, and a prostitute. As Pickford said of her success at Biograph:I played scrubwomen and secretaries and women of all nationalities ... I decided that if I could get into as many pictures as possible, I'd become known, and there would be a demand for my work. She appeared in 51 films in 1909—almost one a week—with her first starring role being in The Violin Maker of Cremona opposite future husband Owen Moore. While at Biograph, she suggested to Florence La Badie to "try pictures", invited her to the studio and later introduced her to D. W. Griffith, who launched La Badie's career.
In January 1910, Pickford traveled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other film companies wintered on the West Coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the East. Pickford added to her 1909 Biographs (Sweet and Twenty, They Would Elope, and To Save Her Soul, to name a few) with films made in California.
Actors were not listed in the credits in Griffith's company. Audiences noticed and identified Pickford within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors, in turn, capitalized on her popularity by advertising on sandwich boards that a film featuring "The Girl with the Golden Curls", "Blondilocks", or "The Biograph Girl" was inside.
Pickford left Biograph in December 1910. The following year, she starred in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP). IMP was absorbed into Universal Pictures in 1912, along with Majestic. Unhappy with their creative standards, Pickford returned to work with Griffith in 1912. Some of her best performances were in his films, such as Friends, The Mender of Nets, Just Like a Woman, and The Female of the Species. That year, Pickford also introduced her friends Dorothy and Lillian Gish to Griffith, and each became a major silent film star, in comedy and tragedy, respectively. Pickford made her last Biograph picture, The New York Hat, in late 1912.
She returned to Broadway in the David Belasco production of A Good Little Devil (1912). This was a major turning point in her career. Pickford, who had always hoped to conquer the Broadway stage, discovered how deeply she missed film acting. In 1913, she decided to work exclusively in film. The previous year, Adolph Zukor had formed Famous Players in Famous Plays. It was later known as Famous Players–Lasky and then Paramount Pictures, one of the first American feature film companies.
Pickford left the stage to join Zukor's roster of stars. Zukor believed film's potential lay in recording theatrical players in replicas of their most famous stage roles and productions. Zukor first filmed Pickford in a silent version of A Good Little Devil. The film, produced in 1913, showed the play's Broadway actors reciting every line of dialogue, resulting in a stiff film that Pickford later called "one of the worst [features] I ever made ... it was deadly". Zukor agreed; he held the film back from distribution for eleven months.
Pickford's work in material written for the camera by that time had attracted a strong following. Comedy-dramas, such as 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 asked for the first of her many publicized pay raises based on the profits and reviews. The film marked the first time Pickford's name was featured above the title on movie marquees. Tess of the Storm Country was released five weeks later. Biographer Kevin Brownlow observed that the film "sent her career into orbit and made her the most popular actress in America, if not the world".
Her appeal was summed up two years later by the February 1916 issue of Photoplay as "luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity". Only Charlie Chaplin, who slightly surpassed Pickford's popularity in 1916, had a similarly spellbinding pull with critics and the audience. Each enjoyed a level of fame far exceeding that of other actors. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world, or, as Adela Rogers St. Johns later described her, "the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history".
Stardom
Pickford starred in 52 features throughout her career. On June 24, 1916, Pickford signed a new contract with Zukor that granted her full authority over the production of the films in which she starred, and a record-breaking salary of $10,000 a week. In addition, Pickford's compensation was half of a film's profits, with a guarantee of $1.04 million (US$ in ), making her the first actress to sign a million-dollar contract. She also became vice-president of Pickford Film Corporation.