Lillian Gish – By Clara Beranger (Picture Play Magazine – September 1926)

Picture Play Magazine – September 1926 Vol. XXV No.1

Famous Types and Why They Appeal

The second installment in a series of character studies by a leading scenario writer, discussing just why it is someof the great screen favorites attract us.

By Clara Beranger

Lillian Gish.

Exquisitely delicate of feature and form, suggests a painting by an old master. Had she lived in the days of the Italian Renaissance, she could easily have been the model for Da Vinci. She has the inscrutability of the women of Da Vinci, the same suggestive, mystic beauty. She gives the same effect of subdued mystery, of the pathos of dreams that can never find fulfillment.

Hester Prynne – Lillian Gish in the Scarlet Letter

She is one of those delicately clairvoyant instruments through whom we become aware of the subtler forces of nature. Cruder elements—sex, greed, hate—can be portrayed by almost any one. But no one but Lillian Gish can awaken us to faint, secret stirrings of influences outside of material things. She is a breath of wind whispering sweetly soothing promises of better things.

And because, in this earthly world of ours, spirituality must always be a whisper, because illusion is always crushed by reality, there is infinite pathos in the embodiment of a pure spirit. When we look into the eyes of Lillian Gish, we feel the pathos of unfulfilled dreams, of lost illusions, and we want to weep. But we love to be stirred, and so we love Lillian Gish.

Lillian Gish – Picture-Play Magazine (Sep 1926)

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