Lillian and Dorothy Gish were born in Ohio, daughters of an actress and her absentee drifter husband. Stage juveniles being in constant demand, both girls were acting professionally before they were 5. They were enticed into movies by their friend Mary Pickford, who was already working for D. W. Griffith, and they made their screen debut together in his An Unseen Enemy (1912).
Over the next two years the sisters played numerous roles for Griffith's company, both together and separately. At first, Griffith had trouble telling them apart (tying colored ribbons in their hair, he addressed them as 'red' and 'blue') but their very different characters, and screen personae, soon emerged. Dorothy was effervescent, gregarious, a natural comedienne. Lillian was serious, intense, with a toughness belied by her delicate looks. "When Dorothy arrives the party begins," Lillian once remarke, adding wryly, "When I arrive it usually ends."
Dorothy, Griffith noted, "was more apt to getting the director's idea than Lillian, quicker to follow it, more easily satisfied with the result. Lillian conceived an ideal and patiently sought to realize it. Since this dedicated approach appealed more to Griffith's own workaholic temperament, Lillian generally got the better parts, and was awarded the led in his epoch-making Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). As Elsie Stoneman, daughter of a family split by the conflict, she transcended the hearts-and-flowers, virgin-in-jeopardy elements of the role with a performance of sustained emotional truth. The film made her a major star, as Griffith acknowledged in casting her as the iconic cradle -rocking Mother linking the four stories of his next epic, Intolerance (1916).
There seems to have been no rivalry between the sisters. Lillian suggested Dorothy as a rowdy French peasant girl in their first major film together, the First World War drama Hearts of the World (1918), and was amused when Dorothy stole the picture. Eve so, Dorothy, Dorothy continued to work for other directors, while Griffith reserved Lillian ("She is the best actress I know. She has the most brains.") for his silent films.
Lillian's supreme performance for Griffith was as the abused child of Broken Blossoms (1919), terrorized by a brutal father and finding tenderness with a lonely young Chinaman in nineteenth-century Limehouse. It was pure Victorian melodrama, dripping with with sentiment, but transmuted by the subtlety of Gish's acting and the power-for all her ethereal looks-with which she could convey raw emotion. Way Down East (1920), no less melodramatic, made equally good use of her blend of physical frailty and inner tenacity.
Dorothy continued to specialize in comedies, including one directed by Lillian, Remodeling her Husband (1920). It did well, but Lillian found directing "too complicated" and refused to try it again. Dorothy's range reached far beyond comedy, as shown by their finest film together, Orphans of the Storm (1921). They played sisters caught up in the French Revolution: Dorothy's performance as the blind sister, moving but not for a moment mawkish, isin no way overshadowed by Lillian's
It was their last film for Griffith, who could no longer afford Lillian's salary. They parted from him amicably and moved to the Inspiration Company, where they made Romola (1924) together-from George Eliot's novel. Lillian signed a contract with MGM. Dorothy went to London for four films for Herbert Wilcox, of which the most successful was Nell Gwynne (1926).
Lillian was now one of the highest paid (400,00 p.a.) actresses in Hollywood, able to approve her own scripts and directors. She chose Victor Sjostrom to direct her in two of her greatest roles: a passionate, wayward Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1926), and the gentle wife whipped into desperation by the elements in The Wind (1928), a performance of awesome physicality.
But fashions were changing. Garbo's star was in the ascendant, and Lillian was too identified with virginal virtues and the silent cinema. Irving Thalberg offered to fabricate a scandal for her; she coolly declined, and returned to the live stage. Dorothy did the same, her film career virtually over. Lillian, though, appeared in a dozen or so films after 1940, of which the finest was Charles Laughton's Gothic fable The Night of the Hunter (1955). In it she portrays, as Simon Callow (1987) comments, "the spirit of absolution and healing ... with a kind of secular sanctity which cannot be forged." Gish relished making the film: "I have to go back as far as D.. W. Griffith to find a set so imbued with purpose and harmony." Coming from her there could be no greater praise. (Many newspapers carried photographs of Lillian with Laughton, co-star Shelly Winters, Mary Pickford and columnist Hedda Hopper when Lillian making her return to Hollywood. She arrived by train.)
Lillian outlived her sister by a quarter-century, aging gracefully and still acting in her mid-nineties. Well before her death, she saw herself securely reinstated as the supreme actress of the silent cinema. Dorothy, a fine actress if not a great a one, still awaits a fair reassessment.
(c) Oxford History of World Cinema: The definitive history of cinema worldwide Oxford 1996 edition with Notes from my Gish lectures and academic appearances.
See earlier posting on D. W. Griffith circa 2005.
Jim Patterson, Editor
www.LDGish.blogspot.com
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