Lillian Diana Gish www.lilliangish1893.com

Lillian Gish, left an estate worth $10 million, to endow an annual award in the performing arts. – By Nadine Brozan (The New York Times – March 6, 1993) CHRONICLE Lillian Gish, left an estate worth $10 million, with most of it to endow an annual award in the performing arts. By Nadine Brozan The New York Times – March 6, 1993 Lillian Gish, who died last Saturday, left an estate worth $10 million, with most of it to endow an annual award in the performing arts, Reuters reported yesterday. Miss Gish was 99, and her career spanned virtually the entire history of movies, starting with silent films. Her 19-page will, filed in Surrogates Court in Manhattan and dated Feb. 21, 1986, distributes about $1 million to 20 people, including relatives and friends, in bequests ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. Helen Hayes was given opal jewelry, while Miss Gish left artworks by Grandma Moses to Miss Hayes’s sons, James and Charles MacArthur. Miss Gish directed that the re...

Lillian Gish’s Face (Opinion – The New York Times – 1993) Opinion – The New York Times – 1993 Lillian Gish’s Face March 2, 1993 What one can see at the movies is astonishing. The earth splits, mountains fall, oceans rise up, entire cities disappear. But sometimes the most astonishing sight of all is an actor’s face. That was especially true when films were silent. Sure, there were subtitles but it was the face — the curve of a lip or the lift of an eyebrow or the suggestion of a frown — that really delivered the text. If the face belonged to a Charlie Chaplin or a Lillian Gish, the audience would remember its message forever. Lillian Gish was born in 1893, a few years after Thomas Alva Edison contrived “moving pictures.” Fifteen years later she was working in D. W. Griffith’s one-reelers: a young woman with thick, flyaway hair, big eyes and a small, pursed mouth. She was pretty and pleasant to look upon, but prettiness can’t hold the eye for very long. Rather, it was ...

Lillian Gish Looks Back on a Century – By John J. O’Connor (The New York Times – 1988) The New York Times – 1988 Review/Television; Lillian Gish Looks Back on a Century By John J. O’Connor July 11, 1988 You can’t get off to a better start than Lillian Gish, now in her 90’s and still managing to hit just the right balance between fragility and feistiness. Beginning its second season on public television, tonight at 9 on Channel 13, ”American Masters” is presenting ”Lillian Gish: The Actor’s Life for Me.” Produced and directed by Terry Sanders, the hour-long film offers a profile of Miss Gish as ”told in her own memories, thoughts and words.” The narrator is Eva Marie Saint. The opening moments are worrying as we watch Miss Gish board a jetliner and settle in for what looks suspiciously like a journey into tired devices. But it seems that the point of this elaborate setup is merely to illustrate the length of Miss Gish’s ”journey across the 20th century.” Miss Saint not...