Following is his obituary for Lillian from March 1993
Lillian was Always One in a Million
An Appreciation by Charles Champlin
Hollywood- During Jimmy Carter's presidency, Lillian Gish was invited to the White House for a reception marking the 10th anniversary of the American Film Institute. After the brief ceremony, Gish stood in the ornate Red Room talking with friends. She looked around and said, "I've been in this room before. Mr. Griffith and I came here to meet President Harding.
It was an astonishing remark, and another reminder of just how much of the whole life of the motion pictures Gish's career had spanned even then. She was not quite as old as the movies when she died on Sunday at the age of 99; the movies are a century old more or less, depending on which event one uses as a start date.
But Gish had lived the whole development of the motion picture as an art form, from the crudest one reelers when her Mr. Griffith- David Wark Griffith- was first beginning to perfect the language of filmmaking, to "The Whales of August" in wide-screen color and stereophonic sound in 1987, when she was already past 90.
Longevity is its own kind of miracle with its particular brand of fascination. Thinking of Gish, it is impossible not to think as well of the commonplaces, from radio and television to the ball point pen, that came in her lifetime, let alone men on the moon and a space probe escaping the solar system and sailing on into interstellar space.
It is inconceivable that an actress of another generation will be able to know quite the life in art that Gish knew, born in a trunk, and trouping at 5, inventing (ina sense) the art of screen acting even as her mentor Griffith was demonstrating all the things that could be done with the camera and in the cutting room.
No current actress would likely be asked to do - or be agreeable to doing - the life-endangering stunts Gish did herself, most unforgettably crossing the ice floe in "Way Down East," a sequence that is difficult, if thrilling, to watch even now.
Perhaps nothing was more notable about her long career than she survived and conquered not only the movies shift from silence to sound (which stopped many a career in its tracks) but prospered throughout the advancing of her own years - an inevitable process that has ended many an acting career, for women more cruelly than for men.
Had she been only a film actress, maturity might have been a problem for her too. But she was an actress for all venues and when Hollywood - which for all practical purposes invented the cult of youth and perpetuates it still - looked askance, Gish went to the theater, where the quality of performance triumphs over all. In her 30s she could play a still youthful Ophelia to John Gielgud's Hamlet.
Sadly, too few of her silent films are easily accessible for viewing, so that Gish at the peak of her powers and originality has been for later generations a name and a legend more than a presence, and the later work in supporting roles, as in Robert Altman's "The Wedding" (1978) is admirable without being indelible. Longevity has its penalties as well as its rewards."
(C) LA TImes
END
Jim Notes:
As an East Coaster I occasionally saw some of Champlin's articles in other publications or clips from friends and relatives in California. It was the PBS series Film Odyssey that brought Champlin into my high school film world in 1972. It was a 26-week series on international film with some great, great examples of world cinema.
Champlin provided brief discussions of the film to be screened and did some interviews with cinema greats like Hitchcock, King Vidor, Roman Polanski, and Stanley Kaufman.
Films I saw for the first time included: Jules et Jim, The Blue Angel, Grand Illusion, M, The Seven Samurai, Beauty and the Beast, The 39 Steps with Robert Donat, Potemkin, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Knife in the Water, The Overcoat, Our Daily Bread, Yojimbo, The Last Laugh, Man of Aran, L'AVVENTURA, Two Daughters, Los Olividados, and Ballad of A Soldier (Russian).
I corresponded with
Judith Crist about these films because she was the film critic for TV Guide and
wrote brief reviews of each week's film. Years later I met her several times in New
York. Late in her life, we discussed why PBS stopped screening foreign films. We
took hope TCM would continue to screen some of them.
USA Today March 1, 1993, page 40.
Weak, waif-like, clinging to an ice floe as it sweeps toward
a waterfall in Way Down East – an enduring
image of Lillian Gish, who died Saturday at 99.
But such images belie the indomitable spirit of the actress,
who refused a stand-in for Way Down East
(1920) and ultimately made 100-plus films in 75 years.
Gish was a favorite of pioneering director D. W. Griffith,
appearing in his silent classics The
Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance
(1916) and 38 others. Considered among her finest silent films was La Boheme (1926), in which she
reportedly went without water for days to look convincing in her death scene.
Gish got her first stag role at age 5 and returned to the
boards in the 1930s, appearing in Uncle
Vanya, Camille, and Hamlet. Later she took character roles
in such films as Duel in the Sun
(1946), The Night of the Hunter
(1955) and A Wedding (1978), in which
the bulk of her role consisted of playing a corpse. Her last starring role was
1987’s The Whlaes of August with
Bette Davis.
She received an honorary Oscar in 1971, a Kennedy Center
Honor in 1982 and American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement award in
1984.
Gish never married, saying “marriage is a 24-hour-a-day job,
and I have always been much too busy to make a good wife.
© USA Today
Jim Note: I corrected obvious errors in these published obits
Jim Patterson, Editor
LDGish.blogspot.com
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