"American Experience" Mary Pickford Soundtrack (2005)

Synopsis

Through interviews with film historians and biographers, and through archival footage, the rise and fall of the professional life of actress and businessperson Mary Pickford (1892-1979) - born Gladys Smith - and the associated ebbs and flows in her personal life, are presented. At the height of her fame, she was dubbed "America's Sweetheart" despite being born in Canada. Mary's widowed mother, Charlotte Smith, got herself, Mary and Mary's two siblings into the somewhat disreputable profession of acting - first on the stage, then into the emerging form of moving pictures - as a means of economic survival, but it soon became clear of Mary's star quality compared to her other family members. Mary and Charlotte's foray into the business side of show business was in a means to take control of Mary's own career, against the actions of impresarios and studio executives who may not have had Mary's best interests at heart. Arguably the biggest maneuver in Mary's business life was the formation of United Artists in 1919 with director D.W. Griffith, fellow actor Charles Chaplin and who would become her second of three husbands, fellow actor Douglas Fairbanks, that marriage the most famous of the three despite not being the longest. United Artists was not only a means to distribute the movies made under their production company under their control, but to provide an outlet for all creative artists in the motion picture business some financial security. Mary's slide began in the late 1920s having overextended herself in her own human resource on the business side, and her adoring fans not allowing her to grow up on screen, the advent of talking pictures only one of the many aspects which showed a Mary with who the public could not relate. Mary's Academy Award win as Best Actress in 1930 for Coquette (1929), not a typical Pickford role and the first speaking role to win the award, is largely seen as an award to her contributions to the film industry as opposed to an award for this particular role.

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