Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart
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by Peggy Dymond Leavey
Dundurn, Toronto, 2011
221 pp., illus., $19.99 paperback
Mary Pickford came to be known as America’s sweetheart. By the age of twenty-four, she was a millionaire and the highest-paid woman in the world. She was also a savvy businessperson who co-founded United Artists in 1919.
Yet Pickford came from humble beginnings. Born in Toronto in 1892 as Gladys Louise Smith, her alcoholic father died when she was six years old. Her mother was left with three young children and took in boarders to help make ends meet. As luck would have it, one boarder was a theatre manager, and the entire Smith family went to work on the stage, travelling around the United States to perform live for very little money.
Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s Sweetheart is an entertaining read about a great entertainer. When Mary was seventeen, her mother encouraged her to work in the “moving pictures.” Young Mary thought this was “beneath her dignity,” but for the princely sum of five dollars a day she swallowed her pride and was hired and trained by the renowned D.W. Griffith at the Biograph Company.
Pickford’s second marriage, to Douglas Fairbanks in 1920, made the couple “Hollywood royalty.” They lived in their Beverley Hills mansion, Pickfair, while continuing their careers.
An astute student of human behaviour, Pickford used this skill in her theatre and movie performances — for which she won two Oscars — and later as a producer. Biographer Peggy Dymond Leavey gives further insight into Pickford’s life and provides an useful chronology for diehard Pickford fans.
— Beverley Tallon (Read bio)
Beverley Tallon is a freelance writer and the former Assistant Editor for Canada's History.