Ralph Lucas –
Was it a coincidence that the city often referred to as Hollywood North was the birthplace of one of the most powerful women in Hollywood?
“America’s Sweetheart”, Mary Pickford, was born Gladys Louise Smith 131 years ago on April 8, 1893. The little girl who grew up to enchant the world made her stage debut in Toronto with the Cummings Stock Company at the Princess Theatre in a production titled The Silver King. Just five years old, she appeared as both a little girl and a little boy. She had one line: “Don’t speak to her, girls; her father killed a man.”
Gladys’s own father had died at a young age, and her mother, Charlotte, quickly became a classic stage mother. By 1902 they were in New York and “Baby Gladys,” as she was billed, was getting work.
But the name didn’t last. At 14 she landed a role in a Broadway production of The Warrens of Virginia. Producer David Belasco helped the young actress come up with the name Mary Pickford, which came from her maternal grandfather, John Pickford Hennessey.
A year later, in 1908, Mary flirted her way into an extra role in the D.W. Griffith film The Lonely Villa. After she earned five dollars for a day of work, Griffith asked her to return the next day. Boldly, she responded by asking for $10. She was back on set the next day, and quickly emerged as one of the key players at the Biograph film company.
Early fans knew her as “Little Mary” or “The Girl with the Golden Hair” as she starred in dozens of Biograph films, eventually leaving live theatre behind. As her stature and fame grew, she took increasing control over her film career, often dictating the terms of her productions, including who would direct her and who would play her leading man. She began receiving credit as a producer in 1911.
Many of Pickford’s earliest films were copied in Russia and distributed through the European underground market. The financial loss for Biograph was enormous, but piracy of her work made Pickford an international superstar. She parlayed her success into more and more lucrative financial rewards.
With help from her ever-present mother, Pickford negotiated almost total control of her work at Biograph — she was just 20 years old — but believed she was being overshadowed by powerful messages in Griffith’s work.
In 1916 she signed with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Company. The contract was unprecedented, bringing her salary to an astounding $10,000 a week, on top of a $30,000 signing bonus. She was also allowed a significant share of profits from her films. In today’s money, her weekly salary alone was worth more than $280,000. But even bigger things lay ahead.
Pickford honoured her Famous Players contract for less than a year before moving on to an even bigger payday – a staggering agreement of $350,000 per movie – and by 24 she was Hollywood’s first millionaire.
But a downside was looming. Within three short, incredible years, no studio could afford her salary and accommodate her demands. Charlie Chaplin was the only other star of a similar magnitude, and when he found himself in the same situation, the two decided to form their own studio. United Artists was born in 1919, and included as co-founders the man who had helped start it all, D.W. Griffith, and the swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks, who became Pickford’s second husband.
United Artists continues to this day, but in 1935 her marriage to Fairbanks ended. Knowing it would make work at the studio impossible, Pickford and Chaplin bought out their partners in United Artists. They maintained control of the company into the 1950s. Chaplin had divested himself from the company by 1955 and Pickford sold her shares in 1956 for $3 million. A year earlier she had published her autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow.
A founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Pickford won the first best actress Oscar for 1929’s Coquette. She was given an honorary Oscar at the 1976 Academy Awards.
A world star and fixture in American culture for decades, toward the end of her life Pickford became concerned that she had lost her Canadian citizenship when she married her first husband, the actor Owen Moore, in New York. She acted quickly to re-establish her Canadian citizenship and in November 1978, Canada’s secretary of state, John Roberts issued her a letter welcoming her back as a Canadian citizen. She was quoted at the time as saying, “I wanted to be a Canadian again because of my mother and father.”
Six months later, on May 28, 1979, Mary Pickford died in Santa Monica, California. The famous actress is remembered in Toronto with a plaque and a bust outside the Sick Kids Hospital on University Avenue, where the home she grew up in once stood.
Ralph Lucas is the founder and publisher of Northernstars.ca: The Canadian Film Database
