Pickford, Mary

Related Category: Film and Television: Biographies

1893–1979, American movie actress, b. Toronto, Ont. In 1909 she began working with D. W. Griffith. Specializing in playing young girls, she was dubbed “America's Sweetheart.” Her films include A Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), Pollyanna (1919), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), and Tess of the Storm Country (1922). In 1919 she cofounded the distribution firm United Artists with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, her husband. She produced her own films thereafter. She won an Academy Award for Coquette (1929), her first movie with sound. She retired from acting in 1933, but continued to produce films for United Artists.

See her autobiography (1955); biographies by R. Windeler (1974) and E. Whitfield (1997); K. Brownlow, Mary Pickford Rediscovered (1999).