A beautiful soul, a girl child, born with a caul . . . 127 years ago

 

Lillian Gish – Photo Gallery

In the beginning …

A beautiful soul, a girl child, born with a caul . . . supposed to mean good

 fortune, even occult power. Mary Gish did not much concern herself with

 this superstition; she had been rather strictly raised; when she gave her

 daughter the name of Lillian, and added Diana—Lillian because she was

 so fair, and Diana because a big moon looked into her window she 

thought it a happy combination and hoped well for it —no more than that.

Lilian Gish is the damsel of Arthurian legend, tendered in terms of the 

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her heroines perpetually hover in filtered 

half-lights, linger in attitudes of romantical despair. They forever drift 

farther from reality than the dream, and no matter how humble their 

actual origins, the actress invariably weaves them of the dusk-blues, 

the dawn-golds of medieval tapestries. She was film. Film started in 1893

, and so did she. One hundred and twenty-seven years – a blink. 

A century of dreams and hopes …

photo of Gish by Witzel of L. A., signed and inscribed in black ink 1914

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