Vanity Fair presents Lillian Gish (1919 – 1983 Pictorial)

The particular genius of Lillian Gish lies in making the definite charmingly indefinite. Her technique consists in thinking out a characterization directly and concretely and then executing it in terms of semi-vague suggestion. The acting of every other woman in the moving pictures is a thing of hard, set lines; the acting of Lillian Gish is a thing of a hundred shadings, hints and implications. The so-called wistful smile of the usual movie actress is a mere matter of drawing the lips coyly back from the gums; her tears are a mere matter of inhaling five times rapidly through the nose, blinking the eyes and letting a few drops of glycerine trickle down the left cheek.

Lillian Gish – Vanity Fair August 1919

Lillian Gish Tease Way Down East – Vanity Fair June 1920

Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish – Orphans – Vanity Fair November 1921

Lillian Gish Pensive Romola – Vanity Fair November 1923

Lillian Gish – Romola – Vanity Fair August 1924

Lillian Gish – Vanity Fair April 1925

Lillian Gish by Henry Major – Vanity Fair January 1926

Lillian Gish as Mimi – Vanity Fair January 1926

Lillian Gish in Scarlet Letter – Vanity Fair Magazine August 1926

Lillian Gish – Santa Monica – Vanity Fair June 1927

Lillian Gish – Passport Photo2 – Vanity Fair July 1927

Lillian Gish – Vanity Fair September 1928 detail

Lillian Gish – Vanity Fair December 1929

Lillian Gish – Uncle Vanya – Steichen Santa Monica – Vanity Fair May 1930

Lillian Gish – Book Jacket Photo – Vanity Fair October 1931

Lillian Gish Lady of Camelias – Vanity Fair July 1932

Lillian Gish – Vanity Fair December 1932

Lillian Gish – Within The Gates – The Harlot Janice – Vanity Fair November 1934

Lillian Gish and Jeanne Moreau – Vanity Fair October 1983

The smile of the Gish girl is a bit of happiness trembling on a bed of death; the tears of the Gish girl, in so far as they arc tears at all, are the tears that old Johann Strauss wrote into the rosemary of his waltzes. The whole secret of the young woman’s remarkably effective acting rests, as I have observed, in her carefully devised and skilfully negotiated technique of playing always, as it were, behind a veil of silver chiffon. She attacks a role, not head-on and with full infantry, cavalry, artillery, bass drums and Y. M. C. A. milk chocolate, as do her sister actresses, but from ambush. She is always present, she always dominates the scene, yet one feels somehow that she is ever just out of sight around the corner. One never feels that one is seeing her entirely. There is ever something pleasantly, alluringly missing, as there is always in the case of women who are truly “acting artists.”

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