Lillian Gish

Lillian Diana Gish was born on October 14, 1893, in Springfield, Ohio. Her father, James Lee Gish, was an alcoholic who caroused around, was rarely at home and left the family to more or less fend for themselves. To help make ends meet, Lillian, her sister Dorothy Gish and their mother, Mary Gish a. k. a. Mary Robinson McConnell, tried their hand at acting in local productions. Lillian was all of six years old when she first appeared in front of an audience. For the next 13 years, she and Dorothy appeared before stage audiences with great success. Actually, had she not made her way into films, Lillian quite possibly could have been one of the great stage actresses of all time. Ultimately, though, she found her way onto the big screen.

In 1912, she met famed director D. W. Griffith.

Impressed with what he saw, he immediately cast her in what was to be her first film, An Unseen Enemy (1912), followed by The One She Loved (1912) and My Baby (1912).

She would make 12 films for Griffith in 1912. With 25 films in the next two years, Lillian's exposure to the public was so great that she fast became one of the top stars in the industry, right alongside Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart".

She once autographed an 8mm copy of her film The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913) for a young filmmaker named Harry McDevitt.

In 1915, Lillian starred as Elsie Stoneman in Griffith's most ambitious project to date, The Birth of a Nation (1915). She was not making the large number of films that she had been in the beginning because she was successful and popular enough to be able to pick and choose the right films to appear in.

The following year, she appeared in another Griffith classic, Intolerance (1916).

She was originally a member of the America First Committee, which advocated against US intervention in WWII. It was not an uncommon position to be against America joining the war, with polls showing that 40% of Americans agreed at one point, but eventually Nazi brutality made anti-war sentiment a radical opinion--one most infamously associated with the fascist-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh. Gish was against any war due to her experience filming "Hearts of the World" (1918), a WWI propaganda film, with D.W. Griffith in war-time France, in which she saw the horrors the Great War had unleashed. On why she opposed American involvement in WWII, Gish said, "If I could save one American life and ruin my career in doing so, I would consider my career well lost." However, she resigned as a member of the committee several months before Pearl Harbor, and would later write a letter, "I made War Propaganda", in the periodical Scribner's Commentator. After war was declared on Germany in December 1941, isolationism fell heavily out of favor with the dominant sentiment of the nation but Mary Pickford defended her: "This lady is as you and I are. She was merely against war".

By the early 1920s, her career was on its way down. As with anything else, be it sports or politics, new faces appeared on the scene to replace the "old", and Lillian was no different.

In fact, she did not appear at all on the screen in 1922, 1925 or 1929.

After her amicable parting with D.W. Griffith she joined MGM in 1925, but was unceremoniously dumped when Greta Garbo emerged as a star. Considered a "sexless antique", she turned to radio and her first love, the theater. Ironically, MGM had Garbo on the set of The Scarlet Letter (1926) every day to watch Gish work as part of her apprenticeship.

However, 1926 was her busiest year of the decade with roles in La Bohème (1926) and The Scarlet Letter (1926). As the decade wound to a close, "talkies" were replacing silent films. However, Lillian was not idle during her time away from the screen. She appeared in stage productions, to the acclaim of the public and critics alike.

In 1933, she filmed His Double Life (1933), but did not make another film for nine years.

When she returned in 1943, she appeared in two big-budget pictures, Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942) and Top Man (1943). Although these roles did not bring her the attention she had had in her early career, Lillian still proved she could hold her own with the best of them.

She earned an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her role of Laura Belle McCanles in Duel in the Sun (1946), but lost to Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge (1946).

One of the most critically acclaimed roles of her career came in the thriller The Night of the Hunter (1955), also notable as the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton.

She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1720 Vine St. on February 8, 1960.

In 1969, she published her autobiography, "The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me".

In 1970 she wrote to congratulate California's First Lady Nancy Reagan after the Governor's wife likened anti-war protesters to Nazis in an interview. "Every time you and Ronnie open your mouths you echo my thoughts," Gish wrote.

On June 11, 1976, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater was dedicated on the Bowling Green State University campus in Bowling Green, OH.

She was filmed for a scene in Woody Allen's Zelig (1983). She scolded legendary director of photography Gordon Willis on his lighting set-up and, while the crew watched aghast, gave Willis step-by-step instructions on how to relight the scene. Willis complied. The scene did not make it into the final version of the film.

In 1984 she received the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1987, she made what was to be her last motion picture, The Whales of August (1987), a box-office success that exposed her to a new generation of fans. Her 75-year career is almost unbeatable in any field, let alone the film industry.

She held director D.W. Griffith in such high regard that, up until her death in 1993, she would always refer to him as "Mr. Griffith".

In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her #19 on its list of the 50 Greatest American Female Screen Legends.