Mary Pickford

I intend to remain young indefinitely

I saw Hollywood born and I've seen it die

It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around.

Gladys Marie Smith (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born film star and co-founder of United Artists, known as "America's Sweetheart" and "the girl with the curls."

Quotes

• I was forced to live far beyond my years when just a child, now I have reversed the order and I intend to remain young indefinitely.
  • "How Mary Pickford Stays Young", Reader's Digest, Vol. 5 (1926); condensed from an interview in Everybody's Magazine (28 May 1926)

I heard Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about a robin who loved a white rose. He loved it so much he pierced his breast and let his heart's blood turn the white rose red. Maybe this sounds very sentimental, but for anybody who has loved a career as much as I've loved mine, there can be no short cuts. ^{[citation needed]}

• [Talking pictures are] like putting lip rouge on the Venus de Milo.
  • Associated Press, "Mary Pickford Sees Talkies as Lipstick on Milo", Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1934, p. 1. Cf. "Los Angeles Times", 20 March 1934, p. A4: "Talking pictures are like lip rouge on the Venus de Milo."
  • Variant: Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.
    • Widely attributed in this form (e.g., A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn: A Biography (1989), Ch. 11) and described as having been said in the 1920s, but the 18 March 1934 AP story quotes it as said that day.

• The refined simplicity should develop out of the complex. [...] It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around.
  • Attributed (1934) in Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (1997), p. 269–270

• You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.
  • "Why Not Try God?", Chapter 6 (newspaper serial), appeared in St. Petersburg Times, 25 January 1936, sect. 2, p. 3[1]

• Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter. What do people go to the theater for? An emotional exercise. And no preachment.
  • Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By ... (1968), p. 134

• I am no longer in pictures for money. I am in them because I love them. I am not in vain. I do not care about giving a smashing personal performance. My one ambition is to create fine entertainment.
  • Herbert Howe, "Mary Pickford's Favorite Stars and Films". Photoplay, January 1924, p. 28-29. (Photoplay Publishing Company).[2]