Mary Pickford (1893-1979) delighted filmgoers from 1909 to 1933. She had beautiful blonde curls and she was the most beloved and famous female movie star of the silent era. Crowds mobbed her wherever she went.

Mary was born in Toronto, Canada on the 8^th of April 1893. She became a child actress at the age of five.

Some of Mary’s films:

• Poor Little Rich Girl (1917)
• Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917)
• The Little Princess (1917)
• Stella Maris (1918)
• M’Liss (1918)
• Daddy Long Legs (1919)
• The Hoodlum (1919)
• Heart of the Hills (1919)

Mary was married three times:

• Owen Moore (1911 to 1920)
• Douglas Fairbanks (1920 to 1936)
• Charles “Buddy” Rogers (1937 until her death in 1979).

She and Charles Rogers adopted two children. During World War One Mary was responsible for raising millions of dollars in war bonds to help the United States.

Mary worked for many different studios before starting up her own film company with Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith called United Artists. United Artists allowed Mary more artistic and financial control over her film projects.

Under United Artists Mary made further financially successful and memorable films, including:

• Pollyanna (1920)
• Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921)
• Tess of the Storm Country (1922)
• Little Annie Rooney (1925)
• Sparrows (1926)

Mary’s last silent film was “My Best Girl” in 1927, in which she starred with her future third husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers.

Mary went on to make several sound films, playing grown up ladies, including 1929’s “Coquette”, for which she won a Best Actress Academy Award. She retired from the big screen in 1934.

Mary wrote three books in her lifetime:

• A religious book entitled “Why not try God?” published in 1934
• “My rendezvous with life”, a brief autobiography published in 1935
• A larger autobiography “Sunshine and Shadow”, published in 1955

She won a Special Academy Award in 1976 for lifetime achievement. Mary Pickford died in Santa Monica, California on the 29^th of May 1979 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Pickford was an actress, a writer, a director, an astute businesswoman and a beautiful woman. Her legend lives on.

I’ll finish the tribute with a quotation from Pickford herself:

“If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you.

What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.”

Rest In Peace Mary.

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