About the Author

Eileen Whitfield is a journalist, playwright, and actor in Toronto.

Reviews

A knockout of a biography. - Newsweek ""Will stand as the definitive biography."" - Library Journal (starred review) ""Just as if a new wing had opened in a national museum or a lost symphony had been restored to the national repertory... Whitfield succeeds in giving us back a memory we thought we didn't want."" - The New Yorker ""A superlatively researched and sensitively written piece of film scholarship."" - Charles Taylor, Salon.com

In a 1925 interview with Photoplay magazine, Mary Pickford (1892-1979) asked her millions of fans to submit ideas for her next film. She got 20,000 responses, all requesting the type of child's roles (Anne of Green Gables, Heidi) Pickford wanted to escape. Biographer Whitfield quotes the magazine to explain that her fans simply wanted " `confirmation of the belief that the sweet, wholesome things in life are worth while.' " This remark turns out to be a perfect, if unintentional, explanation for the success of the escapist movies Pickford offered. Whether or not she portrayed a child, her films retouched reality to affirm the values cherished, though not always practiced, by Pickford's generation. If this emphasis on wholesome innocence left a largely unremarkable body of work, Whitfield's well-written, enjoyable biography underlines Pickford's interest as an actor, and as a canny businesswoman. Though Scott Eyman's 1990 Pickford biography relies more on original interviews, Whitfield more effectively synthesizes authoritative background passages (on Belasco-era theater, the origins of film, the growth of Hollywood, the influence of sound, etc.), which inform as insightfully as her ongoing discussion of Pickford's life and career. Her career eventually dictated her life: Pickford's decade-long reign with Douglas Fairbanks, her second husband, as Hollywood royalty, ended when sound changed popular tastes. Her last screen role in 1933 was followed by the long anticlimax of her final alcoholic decades until‘when her body, mind and many of her films had disintegrated‘America's sweetheart died. Sixty b&w photos, not seen by PW. (Sept.)