Even if you’re not a silent movie buff you’ve probably heard of ‘America’s Sweetheart‘ Mary Pickford. Here are some interesting facts you might not have known about the famous Blondilocks:

1. She co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, husband Douglas Fairbanks Sr and D.W. Griffith in response to the restrictive and controlling ‘Star System’ used by the 5 major movie studios at the time. It offered the actors a chance to have control over their own careers for the first time.
2. Pickford was a prolific actress, believing that the more times she appeared on screen the faster she would become a star.  In 1909 she appeared in an astonishing 51 movies. Silent films tended to be shorter than feature films now, but that was almost 1 a week!
3. The mansion she lived in with 2nd husband Douglas Fairbanks was called Pickfair (a combination of Pickford and Fairbanks) and they would often throw lavish Hollywood parties there.
4. The American Film Institute named her as the 24th greatest female stars of all time. You can see the full list here.
5. She started acting very young and traveled across America with her mother and 2 siblings performing in low-budget local productions.
6. Aged 7 she landed role in a Broadway play and following advice changed her name from Gladys Smith to Mary Pickford.
7. Pickford and Charlie Chaplin were by far cinemas biggest stars during the 1910s
8. When she moved to Zukor studios in 1916 she was paid a record-breaking $10,000 a week.
9. Pickford’s career went into decline because she underestimated the appeal of talkies and famously said: “adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo”, because of this United Artists were late in adopting talking movies and the stars’ popularity suffered.
10. There was public outrage when she cut famously ringleted hair (which was seen to symbolize innocence and purity in an age where morals were slipping) into a fashionable bob in 1928.

Image source and copyright:  2, 3, 4, 5, This media file is in the public domain in the United States. This applies to U.S. works where the copyright has expired, often because its first publication occurred prior to January 1, 1923.

1, This is a press photograph from the George Grantham Bain collection, which was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1948. According to the library, there are no known restrictions on the use of these photos.

6, This work is in the public domain in that it was published in the United States between 1923 and 1977 and without a copyright notice.