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"Then You're a Star": Lillian Gish's Road to Fame
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 The actress, director and Hollywood star Lillian Gish (1893-1993) was just a small child when she began performing. Though she had the potential to be one of the great stage actresses of all time, she made her way into silent film (and subsequently talkies) to become one of the premier stars in the movie industry. In this interview with Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Gish talks about how she got her start. |
Lillian Gish talks about her early experiences.
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Question: Well, I thought perhaps if we could have from you things about your beginnings, your childhood.
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Lillian Gish: We were actresses at the age of 4 and 5. As you know. In touring companies. There was a child actress called Elsie Leslie. She was born in 1881. She was a star in 1887, a big moneymaker in the theater, and from that time on they wrote plays, melodramas, giving the heroine a child or two. We came along 20 years later, and we got jobs in these touring melodramas, going across the country. Not because Mother wanted to; it was out of necessity. Mother was alone here. She was a very pretty young woman in her early twenties. She took in roomers. We had one extra bedroom, and it happened that an actress took it. She got to know Mother and her problems with two children. She said, "Why, you could get a job in the theater." |
Mother said, "How? I don't know anything about it." |
She took her over to Proctor Stock Company, here in New York, and she got a job there as their leading ingenue. She could put her two children to bed at night, with a mattress on the floor so they wouldn't fall out of bed, till she got home. But there was no place to leave them in the daytime, and they had to go to the dressing room and stay there on matinee days. |
One day another actress came in and saw me, and told Mother that she could get a job if Mother would allow me to go on the road with her. I would get $10 a week. It was something called "Convict Stripes," or "The Little Red School House." I made my debut in Rising Sun, Ohio. I was frightened the first night, and ran, and they grabbed me and put me on Walter Huston's shoulder to take my curtain call. |
A few weeks later another actress saw Dorothy [her sister] and told Mother the same thing. Dolores Lorne. She took Dorothy out in another play. |
Then, the next season, Mother got a job with the two of us, in "Her First False Step," and every year we would try and, if possible, get a position with these touring companies, because that way you were sure of 40 weeks' work. You weren't, if you stayed in New York. You might get in a success. You might be in a failure, and out of work. |
So we were doing that for seven or eight years, when we went to see what happened to Gladys Smith [Mary Pickford]. We'd seen her in a film, and wondered what misfortune had befallen that they had to go to movies to make a living. We were here looking for our next job, which I got with David Belasco in "The Good Little Devil," in 1913. |
I became ill. Mother was in Ohio running a Schrafft's type of confectionery store in Dayton, Ohio. It was owned by a family called Long, and they had never had a vacation, but they trusted Mother to take over their shop. Dorothy had gone with a film company, Biograph, to California. Mr. Belasco paid my fare out there because he thought he'd been responsible, because in "The Good Little Devil" I was playing a fairy flying all over the stage. |
We had 17 men on the wires to fly us, and I would go in before every performance and try out all the wires because I liked to fly. During a matinee, my wire became unattached and I stepped five feet into space. |
That was the last play I did. I went to California and joined Biograph Company, got much more money, and stayed in films for 17 years. I came back in '30 with Jed Harris in "Uncle Vanya." And stayed in theater for 10 years. Oh, I did make one film with Arthur Hopkins, because he was the great producer in the theater. He did John Barrymore's "Hamlet," "Peter Ibbetson," and was a very distinguished man, as you know, in theater. |
In 1940, I have to say, I had the misfortune of being in a hit. I was in a play that ran a year and a half in Chicago, without a vacation, or missing even one performance. So I went back to the films. |
Since then, I've alternated--films, radio, television, theater, lecturing, everything. |
Q: That hit was "Life With Father." |
From stage to silver screen
Q: Well, now, can you describe the first time you acted before a camera? |
Gish: Yes. When we met Mary--she was not Gladys Smith, they'd changed their name to Pickford. She was Mary Pickford. Anyway, Mr. [D.W.] Griffith asked if we'd like to sit in an audience scene. He saw us that day, Mother, Dorothy and me. We'd each get $5. Now, $15 for practically doing nothing, we only had to take our hats off, put some makeup on and sit there, reacting. |
It was in a large kind of double house, the studio was the drawing room. The lights, just Cooper-Hewitt lights, above, and everybody looked as if they'd been dead for three weeks, ugly and old. They needed young faces--an old hag of 18 was a character woman. |
We weren't children. We weren't grown up. And it was a way to bridge that gap, until we turned into young leading ladies. We couldn't even play ingenues then in theater. |
Q: Do you remember the instruction you got from Mr. Griffith for that particular scene? |
Gish: No. He just told us what we were looking at, and we were to react just normally. He never told trained actors what to do, because he wrote the plots; it was up to the actors to react and create their own characters. That's why he took professional people. He rarely took amateurs, but trained disciplined actors like Lionel Barrymore. When we complained to Mother about it, she said, "It can't be all bad, there's a Barrymore in the company." |
Q: Now, your childhood. What did your childhood give you as far as advantages and disadvantages? There was a stability, wasn't there? |
Gish: And discipline. Mother educated us, as we traveled. If it was Massachusetts, we learned the history of wherever we were. If we were near Plymouth Rock, we were taken there. If it was Detroit, she took us to the automobile factories, to see how cars were made. When we were in the South, she'd take us out to the cotton fields--watch the cotton growing, then how they picked it, the way it was processed into cloth, and then where they made it into dresses. It was a beautiful but unique education. And in our early teens, we went to Europe. We were seven months in England and France during the First World War. I learned some French. And of course, being in both countries, we were exposed to the museums. We could study paintings. Griffith would make us, when we were not working, go in England to Waterloo or Victoria Station, and watch people saying good-bye to their loved ones going to war, or going down to meet the coffins, or the wounded coming in. |
He said, "You know nothing about life. This is your chance. God willing, you'll never have another such chance. Now, make the best of it." |
So if we were not working, if we were not rehearsing or doing something that had to do with the films we were making, we were out studying the human race. That's the only way you can learn to act. Nobody can teach you to act. |
Q: When I think of the contrast, of young people in films and theater today-- |
Gish: Well, look at the results. It's so--it hurts my pride. This film I was just in, A Wedding, Robert Altman--to go into little theaters holding a few hundred people, when we used to play the legitimate theaters, none of them held less than 1,000, and we'd get the biggest because we would have films that would fill them. And Roxy's, as you know, held 6,400 people. And all of them built with silent movies money, except Radio City Music Hall--the Rockefellers built that--but all the others, not only in America, across America, but around the world. |
Q: Silent films built them? |
Gish: Silent films built them--because we controlled the world. I think films are the only art form America can claim as its own. |
Q: I'd like to read you a definition of a film star, and I'd like you to comment on it. "A film star: One who possesses a quality the public can admire or identify with." How would you define film star? |
Gish: Shall I give you Mr. Griffith's idea? |
Gish: Well, he said, "You think putting your name up there in electric lights will make you a star? You see hundreds of little boys and girls come and go every year that have that happen to them. That doesn't mean you are a star. To be that, you have to make, for at least 10 years, the very best pictures. You have to have the best stories, the best directors, the best actors to play with. You have to be the first there in the morning, and the last to leave at night. You have to know all about the making of films. And after 10 years, if you become, through this, a household word, in every family in the world--not America; the world--then you're a star." |
Q: You were just talking about A Wedding. You recently made the film with Altman. Would you want to compare working in this manner with your earlier career, with the discipline of silent films and walking onto a set today? Just a bit of that, and to compare it with the discipline of what you're saying now. |
Gish: We never walked on the set unless we had rehearsed whatever we were going to do first, sometimes weeks and months, like The Birth of a Nation we rehearsed for months, because we had very little money, and in those days we didn't have electricity. We didn't have electric lights in California. So if the sun wasn't out, or if it was raining or foggy, you rehearsed. You got to the studio very early in the morning and you stayed late at night, because you had to see your rushes, at least I did. Very often--later on, when we took films more than once each scene--I had to pick the rushes, at least mine. And I directed my first film when I was 20, one with Dorothy for Paramount, a five-reel comedy. You had to be a craftsman. And it was much more interesting. There were no unions, no hours. We worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and liked it, because no place was as interesting as the studio. |
Q: Nothing like that exists today. |
Gish: No. They're bored. They don't rehearse. Maybe you're given your lines that morning, and luckily for me, I didn't have to really know them too well. I can read small print from a distance. |
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