An Artist Who Shaped Art of Film

And so, at last, the plowman, turning the furrows of life, comes to the boundary that divides the known from the unknown—the wilderness from the sown field. Whatever we may one day find beyond, is already there in every detail—only, I lack the clairvoyant gift, and turn for a brief backward glimpse. It is no vision of artistic triumph that comes to me tonight . . . not the memory of Chekhov’s radiant heroine . . . not the triste picture of that broken flower of the Limehouse . . . something even more real than these: a real child, trouping with wandering players, away from a mother’s care … a slim-legged little girl, who slept on station benches and telegraph tables, who running across a foot-bridge lost her poor possessions in the swift black water, who from a train or hotel window stared silently into the night.

“What are you looking at, Lillian?”

“Nothing, Aunt Alice, just looking.”

(Albert Bigelow Paine – Life and Lillian Gish)

Photo: Lillian Gish, at radio studios,

where she performed LITTLE WOMEN on April 21, 1935

Lillian Gish, ca. 1970s

“Unless there was a klieg light present, Lillian couldn’t react emotionally, Rather than face any crisis, she would choose to withdraw and stay inside her apartment instead of talking about it, no matter what it was.

We knew her, so we didn’t push the issue. If what had happened to her were dramatized in a play or film, she would have played it brilliantly and had audiences in tears, which she knew how to do very well.

In her real day-to-day life, away from the stage or screen, she was lost. She was a slave to fantasy. She went from one role to the next, knowing just which button to press to achieve the desired effect.”

Anita Loos