8 April: Mary Pickford

Silent film actress Mary Pickford, known as "America's Sweetheart" was born on this date in 1892. 10 things you might not know about her:

1. Despite being known as America's sweetheart, she was actually Canadian. She was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto.
2. Her acting career started when she was seven, when she toured with her family as Baby Gladys Smith. Her two siblings, Jack and Lottie, were both actors, too.
3. As a child, she used to eat rose petals, because she believed that doing so would make her as beautiful as a Rose.
4. In 1907, Mary decided that if she didn't land a role in a Broadway play by the end of the year, she would give up acting for a more lucrative career. She did get a role, and two years later went for her first film audition, for the Biograph Company's film Pippa Passes. She didn't get that part, but she did catch the eye of director D. W. Griffith, who signed her for other roles.
5. The Biograph Company didn't do actor's credits. Stars of their films were never listed by name so at first the fan following she quickly amassed didn't even know her name. They referred to her as "The Biograph Girl" or "The Girl with the Golden Curls". The cinemas used these nicknames on their advertising to let potential customers one of her films was showing.
6. Mary was less than five feet tall and many of her roles were young girls such as Pollyanna or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. In fact, she was so young looking that when she first met her future stepson Douglas Fairbanks Jr, then still a boy, he thought she was a play date his father had brought for him and asked her to join him playing with his train set. She did.
7. After her mother died, Mary cut off her famous curls. Her action was possibly motivated by grief as the two had been very close; but it could also have been that she no longer wanted to be known as a "little girl". The fact that she'd had a haircut made the front page of the papers in New York. It didn't go down well with some of her fans, who sent her hate mail because of it.
8. Mary Pickford was married three times. She was married to actor/writer Owen Moore from 1911-1920, to actor/writer/producer Douglas Fairbanks from 1920-1936, and to Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers from 1937 to her death in 1979. Marrying Fairbanks led to her being Joan Crawford's mother in law when her stepson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., married her in 1929.
9. She didn't welcome the advent of talkies. She once said, "Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus DeMilo." While it was true that her film acting career pretty much ended with the talkies (although it could also have been that she was getting to old to play young girls and other roles didn't suit her so well) she starred in some plays and also went into the production side as a businesswoman. Mary co-founded United Artists along with Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks while she was still acting and got more involved with the production side after she retired. She also became a philanthropist. At the end of WWI, she helped found the Motion Picture Relief Fund to help needy actors, and started a scheme where people in the industry would pledge a tiny percentage of their salary to the fund. The fund provided a retirement home, the Motion Picture Country House, for actors who couldn't afford a retirement home.
10. She was the first actress to sign a million dollar contract; the first to receive a percentage of a film's profits; the first artist to have her name in marquee lights and be billed as an “International” Star; and the first, along with Douglas Fairbanks, to leave her handprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater. Even if the tale that Norma Talmadge was first, because she accidentally walked through the wet concrete and gave Sid Grauman the idea, Mary Pickford was still the first to do it deliberately.

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