Lillian Gish Before Camera in Disney Film – By Vernon Scott (San Bernardino Sun, 1965)

 

Lillian Gish Before Camera in Disney Film – By Vernon Scott (San Bernardino Sun, 1965)

  • San Bernardino Sun, Volume 72, 27 September 1965
  • Lillian Gish Before Camera in Disney Film
  • By Vernon Scott

HOLLYWOOD (UPI) – The most durable star in screen history has to be Lillian Gish, who starred in D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and is still going strong in a new Walt Disney picture. The fragile beauty of the great actress remains evident in scenes for Disney’s “Follow Me. Boys” more than a half century after her first trip to Hollywood. Bright-eyed and young in heart, Miss Gish enacts her role as a small town dowager with the same enthusiasm that distinguished her ingenue characterizations in the flickering infant days of the film. And she loves every minute of it.

“In all my years and Lord knows how many pictures, I’ve worked with only two authentic geniuses Mr. Griffith and Mr. Disney,” she said in the studio commissary during the lunch break. “I’ve never lost interest in acting, and I’m still learning. How can anyone ever learn all about the human race?” Nearing 70, Miss Gish makes frequent visits to Hollywood for television appearances, only rarely working in pictures. But on her trips west she unfailingly contacts old friends, among them Donald Crisp who played her father in the ancient “Broken Blossoms” and Mae Marsh, one of her co-stars in “Birth of a Nation,” both of whom work occasionally in movies.

Donald Crisp, Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish

Always a resident of New York City where she is actively engaged in the theater, Miss Gish lives in an apartment house which she owns in Manhattan. Her sister Dorothy lives in a nearby hotel. Next month she will co-star in George Abbott’s new Broadway musical “Anya.” The thought of retirement never crosses her mind.

“I think back to the early days when movie makers were poor,” she smiled. “We’d complete one-reel pictures in a single day. Our only lighting was the California sunshine and our equipment consisted of a hand cranked camera on a wooden tripod.”

LILLIAN GISH in (BATTLE OF THE SEXES 1914) Donald Crisp Lillian Gish Robert Harron D W GRIFFITH (scenario)

An actress since childhood, Miss Gish made her professional stage debut at age 5 in “In Convict Stripes.” But it wasn’t until her movies with Griffith, among them “Intolerance,” “Orphans of the Storm” and “Way Down East,” that she became an international star, one of the first. Thousands of glamour girls have come and gone in the intervening years, but Miss Gish endures. If you look closely, the reason is apparent. She emits a glowing inner beauty and love of life the years have left untarnished.

Lillian Gish, Martha Graham, Katharine Cornell New-York USA – May 11, 1965

Back to Lillian Gish Home page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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. “The
Read more

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

ART DECO FASHION – by Suzanne Lussier (2003)

Image
  ART DECO FASHION – by Suzanne Lussier (2003) ART DECO FASHION Suzanne Lussier BULFINCH PRESS AOL Time Warner Book Group Copyright © 2003 by The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum The term Art Deco was employed for the first time in 1968 by the author Bevis Hillier. It identifies an aesthetic in vogue between 1909 and 1939 which was adopted in architecture, the decorative arts, textiles and fashion; it also influenced the fine arts, film and photography. Art Deco displayed stylized motifs and shapes borrowed from national traditions, folk art and ancient cultures, and was strongly influenced by the art of the avant-garde. Art deco fashion_Tamara de Lempicka 1929 Art Deco emerged from a unique artistic conjunction. From 1905, avant-garde movements sprung up one after another throughout Europe: the Fauves and Cubists in Paris, the Futurists in Italy, the Constructivists in Russia. Meanwhile the Ballets Russes were founded in Russia by Sergei Diaghilev who, wanting to re
Read more