Profile: Lillian Gish

Where do you start with Lillian Gish? She was the leading lady of silent film, with a range and believability that are still unmatched.

Lillian and her younger sister, Dorothy (who was more famous for her comedic roles) went on the stage as children, to support the family after their father deserted them. While Mrs. Gish stayed at home and worked, Lillian traveled with an actress in the troupe who cared for her and watched over her, as did Dorothy. Her early exposure to the theatre would lay the foundations for her incredible film career.

Lillian and film grew up together, in a way; as she was traveling from city to city for her stage shows, the early films were being viewed avidly - the subject of the films didn't matter; they were moving pictures, and the public was fascinated by them. Growing to adulthood, Lillian and Dorothy absorbed the stage snobbery toward film, and neither of them could believe it when they saw another stage actress, their friend Gladys Smith, appearing in a short film. They rushed to tell their mother, who also knew the Smith family well; their mother remarked that times must be very bad indeed if Gladys now had to appear in films.

When the Gish sisters saw Gladys again, they questioned her about her career choice. Gladys urged both of them to audition for a film, overcoming no small resistance from all the members of the family. The promise of high wages helped to break them down, and Lillian and Dorothy agreed to meet D.W. Griffith, who had directed Gladys - now renamed Mary Pickford - in her early film appearances.

Griffith later told Lillian what a pretty picture she and Dorothy made on that day in 1912 when he first saw them; they were sitting together, and at first, he couldn't tell them apart. They made their first film appearance together - playing sisters, appropriately enough - and Lillian's film career, which would span an astounding 75 years, had begun.

In her autobiography, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, Lillian spent page after page extolling the virtues of D.W. Griffith. It is almost as much his biography as her autobiography, and I had the feeling, when reading it, that Lillian thought Griffith could do anything short of walking on water. His film innovations were detailed precisely; his accomplishments, his looks, his voice, his generosity, all were given their due.

Griffith was a real star-maker; he had a knack for bringing out the best in the people who worked for him. His talent was, of course, not infallible, but he did have a remarkable success rate. Lillian told of his demands on his cast. They took dancing lessons; rode horses; exercised regularly; took voice lessons; anything that might help them in their performances, they did - and, in Lillian's case, anyway, did gladly. These truly were golden days for film, when new techniques were being tried all the time, when the caste system had yet to establish itself, when actors thought nothing of having a leading part in one film, yet only appearing as an extra in the next film. Lillian's autobiography dwells upon the excitement of those early days, in a long-gone clean and sparsely populated Southern California, when the actors worked long, brutal days to get the maximum of sunlight.

As Griffith's films became more popular, so too did his actors. Mary Pickford left him early, having demanded and found higher pay elsewhere; Walter Miller made his last Griffith film in 1913; Henry B. Walthall left the fold after Birth of a Nation; Blanche Sweet was offered a lucrative deal by another studio, and Griffith himself told her she should take it. Lillian and Dorothy stayed on, as did Robert Harron, growing increasingly famous.

Lillian became the leading lady of Birth of a Nation, True Heart Susie, A Romance of Happy Valley, Broken Blossoms, and Way Down East, among others. Her talent shines through in every performance, regardless of the story. As the abused young girl, Lucy, in Broken Blossoms, the expressions crossing her face upon being given a doll by her Chinese admirer are mesmerizing; her eyes widen slightly when she realizes that the doll's arms and legs move, she gives an approving nod, then remarks "Yep," before cuddling the already-beloved gift. Later in the film, the harrowing scene where Lucy has locked herself in the closet in a vain attempt to escape her murderous father, is almost too painful to watch; Griffith was in tears at the end of it.

Lillian, with her fragile beauty and tiny frame, looked far too delicate to endure more than a gentle breeze blowing upon her. In reality, she was one of the toughest, and likely the most dedicated, performer in film. Way Down East contains the famous scene where Lillian's character, Anna, faints and is carried down a river on an ice floe, headed for the waterfall. Lillian was lying on the ice wearing a thin dress and a cape, with much of her hair and one hand immersed in the water. For the rest of her life, she had problems with her right hand. In La Boheme, to make her character's death scene more realistic, she went without food for three days; her gasping, wide-eyed performance is almost unbearably true.

This was the reality of women in film; onscreen, they were portrayed as weak, frail creatures who fainted at the drop of a hat. Women in silent films were easy to kidnap; the villain simply threw a sheet or a coat over them, and they were out for a week or so. Lillian was living proof of what a woman could endure. She wasn't the only one - Leah Baird, Pearl White, and Miriam Cooper were all strong, athletic, daring women - but she is remembered by more people today.

It was Griffith who made the break with Lillian, after Orphans of the Storm, and she, devastated, began to work with other directors, including King Vidor and Victor Sjostrom (who went by the name of "Seastrom" when he worked in Hollywood). Vidor directed La Boheme, and Lillian claimed that her leading man, John Gilbert, proposed to her after the film's premiere; her secretary claimed that Vidor fell in love with her, too.

She spent most of her time in plays after the advent of talkies, only making the occasional film. One triumphant role was that of Miss Rachel in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, in which tiny, waiflike Lillian faces down and defeats the psychotic - and twice as big - Robert Mitchum with a rifle. She is clearly a force to be reckoned with, and my feeling is that this character came closest to the person she really was.

Lillian, then in her nineties, made her last film in 1987, The Whales of August. Her costar was another screen legend, Bette Davis, who actually looked older than Lillian, despite being young enough to be her daughter (they played sisters in the film). The supporting cast included Vincent Price, Ann Sothern, and Harry Carey, Jr. Price's wife heard that the working title of the film was Alive; she said that, considering the cast, the title should have been Still Alive?

It was Lillian's last shot at an Oscar, but she wasn't even nominated. When Ann Sothern expressed her sympathy, Lillian responded, "It could have been worse. Suppose I'd been nominated and lost to Cher?"