Lillian Gish Still Favors Long Tresses – By Antoinette Donnelly (Chicago Tribune – 1938)

Lillian Gish Still Favors Long Tresses – By Antoinette Donnelly (Chicago Tribune – 1938)

Chicago Tribune – Saturday, April 9, 1938 Page 9

Lillian Gish Still Favors Long Tresses

By Antoinette Donnelly

We talked backstage recently with Lillian Gish, player of the leading role in one of Broadway’s hits of the season, “Star Wagon”. We found her with her waist-length hair hanging, a sight that gladdens the eye unaccustomed to hair rarely even more than shoulder length. Miss Gish’s hair is a beautiful color, too. A silvery ash blonde that she claims has darkened as this type of hair usually does, but it still is, to us, a beautiful silvery ash tone.

Lillian Gish Portrait Promo the tventies detail

We asked Miss Gish how she managed to survive the temptation to cut the long locks, after she admitted never having succumbed once to the urge for short hair. She explained that her hair had been earning her living for her since she was a youngster and that now she has a superstition about cutting it.

Lillian Gish in The Wind - cropped detail close up

Incidentally, we had been at a smart hair showing previously and observed the coiffures built up high. Maybe they are coming in, after all the protest. Anyway, we saw a half dozen of them that afternoon and noted a something that won’t ever bother Miss Gish. The something was the stray wisps, reminiscent of another day when those stray wisps were the bane of our sex. Today’s wisps naturally are the result of hair cut too recently for the high up dressing, so that women who have weathered the scissors storm will be the best models for the high up coiffures.

Lillian Gish in The Enemy - still frame cropped detail

Miss Gish’s silhouette is slim as can be. She is one of those luckies who can eat all and sundry without watching a scale. She thinks, as a consequence, that fat is a matter of glands, not food, although some of the rest of us have good reason to suspect otherwise. No doubt the fact that Miss Gish has been a dancing school fan and attendant since she was a youngster has much to do with her slim figure. She does think dancing good for that, a good exercise for anything. But after taking up fencing her enthusiasms have swung over to it as the perfect exercise for women’s figures and also for the eye and mind alertness it encourages, or rather demands. More women are going in for the fencing, she reports, realizing it to be one grand all around exercise.

Lillian Gish portrait detail cca 1930

Speaking of dress and best dressed women, Miss Gish recalled a remark once made to her about certain women appearing to wear two or even three dresses in one because of the one frock being weighted down with trimming and other gewgaws. Her favorite dress designer is patronized by Miss Gish because of her great skill in turning out a frock completely shorn in those fatal extras.

One superb quality Miss Gish possesses is a great calm, a “quiet,” as we choose to call it, and nominate it top place in exposition of charm. Not an excess motion, a useless play of expression, or a distracting gesture.

 

Lillian Gish by Fred Hartsook detail portrait

Pictorial Star Wagon

Back to Lillian Gish Home page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

D.W. Griffith – An American Life (By Richard Schickel – 1984)

Image
D.W. Griffith – An American Life (By Richard Schickel – 1984) D.W. Griffith – An American Life By Richard Schickel – 1984 Griffith! Before him, the movies were a nickelodeon novelty, after him, they were an international art form and a powerful, glamorous American industry He was the first to codify the rules and techniques of screen storytelling, the first to establish the conventions by which the unique capacities of the movies for both sweeping spectacle and profound intimacy could be employed in long, complex narratives, the first to assert the director’s claim to primary authorship of a film Above all, it was Griffith who imagined the future of his medium, and with his driving energy, his taste for the grandiose and his flair for publicity, propelled that medium toward that future—only to be crushed by the very forces he had unleashed. D.w. Griffith (1875-1948) Painting; D.w. Griffith (1875-1948) Art Print for sale His story is, in huge measure, the story of how the ...
Read more

Lillian Gish and Jeanne Moreau – Vanity Fair 1983

Image
Lillian Gish and Jeanne Moreau – Vanity Fair 1983 Vanity Fair – October 1983 Lillian Gish Jeanne Moreau This is a summit meeting: a queen paying homage to an empress. Of course, Lillian Gish, far right, is no truer a blueblood than any other homespun midwesterner. But wherever she goes now, she is treated like a monarch, acknowledging standing ovations in allAmerican palaces like Radio City Music Hall. Her admirers aren’t really applauding her 101 films (she has just completed the 102nd, about a sweet old lady and her sweet old dog). They may never have seen her slim but supernally intense performances in the D. W. Griffith masterpieces or in the Victor Sjostrom classics she made in the late ’20s at MGM. Lillian-Gish-Jeanne-Moreau 60s But they sense in her the grace, the purity, the wealth of symbolism that royalty sustains. Gish’s companion here, Jeanne Moreau, radiates a similar authority; what Gish was to the cinema of the ’20s, Moreau was to the cinema of the ’60s. ...
Read more

LEADING LADIES – 1976 (Electa Clark) PDF Download

Image
  LEADING LADIES – 1976 (Electa Clark) PDF Download “Humanity marches on into the new and glorious 20th century!” exults a daily paper in its first issue of 1901. “Come, oh century, child of hope!” begins a long poem on page one. Another column trills, “We are 20th century women … with the dower of privilege and responsibility which enriches women in this wonderful era!” Lillian Gish had a similar effect on millions who saw her in the movies. She was not only talented, she had a unique quality: pure, ethereal, elusive. As if she acted in whispers. As if in her hands, the definite blurred into the indefinite. It was drama critic George Jean Nathan who described her as being “behind a veil of silver chiffon.” He courted Lillian for years, but she eluded marriage. Horse drawn float declares National American Woman Suffrage Association’s support for Bristow-Mondell amendment 1920s Lillian Gish Actress ‘La Boheme’ Oversized DBW Photo by Kenneth Alexander Leading ladies an affectionate l...
Read more