Mary Pickford: Encyclopedia II - Mary Pickford - Beginning of career to stardom

Mary Pickford - Beginning of career to stardom

Acting soon became a family enterprise, as Charlotte, Gladys, and her two younger siblings Jack and Lottie, toured the United States by rail in rag-tag melodramas. After six impoverished years of touring, Gladys gave herself a single summer to land a leading role on Broadway (she planned to quit acting if she failed). She landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, The Warrens of Virginia. The play was written by William C. de Mille, whose brother, the then-unknown Cecil B. DeMille, also appeared in the cast. David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. But after completing the Broadway run and touring the play, Pickford was once again out of work.

On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her for a role in the Biograph Company film "Pippa Passes." The role went to someone else, but Griffith was immediately taken with Pickford, and within a few days agreed to pay her an astronomical $10 a day against a guarantee of $40 a week. ("Keep it to yourself," he advised her. "There will be a riot if it leaks out." Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day.) Soon, Pickford's comic blend of sweetness and temper had made her not only Biograph's most important player, but the most popular star of the nickelodeon era. In January 1910 she traveled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles to set up a West Coast studio and appeared in a long list of films, including "Ramona," "The Twisted Trail" and "The Smoker." The advent of feature film sent her fame into the stratosphere. Her appearance in 1914's Tess of the Storm Country represents the major turning point in her career. Her effect in this and similar roles was perfectly summed up by Photoplay magazine: "luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity." Pickford would go on to become Hollywood's biggest female star, earning the right to not only act in her own movies, but produce them and supervise their distribution. She was also the first female actor to receive more than a million dollars per year (the first male actor who made a million-dollar deal was Charlie Chaplin). But the arrival of sound was her undoing. She made four talkies, including "Coquette,"(1929) for which she received the Academy Award. But the public failed to respond to her work in roles that reflected her own age. (In the silents, Pickford played adolescents and women in their early 20s, with a celebrated sideline in children's roles.) Then in her 40s, Pickford was unable to play the teenage spitfires so adored by her silent-film fans; nor could she play the soigne heroines of early sound. She retired from acting in 1933, though she continued to produce films for others, including "Sleep My Love" (1948), an update of "Gaslight" with Claudette Colbert.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Beginning of career to stardom", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki