Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892 in a house on University Avenue in downtown Toronto, into a family left in financial hardship after her father's early death. She began performing on stage as a child to help support her family, touring with theatre companies through her teenage years before moving into the still-new medium of film in New York around 1909, adopting the stage name Mary Pickford not long after.

America's Sweetheart, and a studio founder

Pickford became one of the biggest stars of the silent film era, celebrated internationally as "America's Sweetheart" despite being Canadian by birth, known for playing spirited, youthful heroines well into her thirties. In 1919 she co-founded United Artists alongside Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and her husband Douglas Fairbanks, giving the era's biggest stars direct control over their own film distribution rather than depending entirely on studio contracts — an unusually powerful business position for a woman in early Hollywood. Pickford won the second-ever Academy Award for Best Actress in 1930, and remains one of the most commercially successful and influential stars in film history, her Toronto origins a detail many of her fans never knew.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Mary Pickford
• Wikipedia — Mary Pickford

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