Mary Pickford

Gladys Marie Smith (April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979), known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born film star and co-founder of United Artists, known as "America's Sweetheart" and "the girl with the curls."

Quotes

 * I was forced to live far beyond my years when just a child, now I have reversed the order and I intend to remain young indefinitely.
 * "How Mary Pickford Stays Young", Reader's Digest, Vol. 5 (1926); condensed from an interview in Everybody's Magazine (28 May 1926)


 * [Talking pictures are] like putting lip rouge on the Venus de Milo.
 * Associated Press, "Mary Pickford Sees Talkies as Lipstick on Milo", Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1934, p. 1. Cf. "Los Angeles Times", 20 March 1934, p. A4: "Talking pictures are like lip rouge on the Venus de Milo."
 * Variant: Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.
 * Widely attributed in this form (e.g., A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn: A Biography (1989), Ch. 11) and described as having been said in the 1920s, but the 18 March 1934 AP story quotes it as said that day.


 * The refined simplicity should develop out of the complex. [...] It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around.
 * Attributed (1934) in Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (1997), p. 269–270


 * You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.
 * "Why Not Try God?", Chapter 6 (newspaper serial), appeared in St. Petersburg Times, 25 January 1936, sect. 2, p. 3


 * Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter. What do people go to the theater for? An emotional exercise. And no preachment.
 * Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By ... (1968), p. 134


 * I am no longer in pictures for money. I am in them because I love them. I am not in vain. I do not care about giving a smashing personal performance. My one ambition is to create fine entertainment.
 * Herbert Howe, "Mary Pickford's Favorite Stars and Films". Photoplay, January 1924, p. 28-29. (Photoplay Publishing Company).