Women of the Silent Screen

From the earliest days of the motion picture industry, films have been a reflection of societal conditions and values. Silent films first appeared in the waning days of the Victorian era, and female stars of that period were, indeed, molded by the Victorian ideal of womanhood, both good and evil. This is particularly apparent in three of the greatest actresses of the silent screen--in Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, Victorian heroines and the epitome of femininity for that time, and in Theda Bara, the first of the "vamps," or temptresses who used their feminine wiles to seduce unsuspecting men.

Theda Bara (1890-1955) was the silent screen's first and most famous vamp, and one of the most popular silent screen actresses of the 1910s. Although she rebelled against typecasting, Bara starred in over forty movies in which she almost always portrayed an irresistible siren who lured men to their destruction for her own sensual pleasure.

After two years in college--not an insignificant accomplishment for a woman early in the twentieth century--and nine less-than-stellar years on Broadway in supporting roles, her first major screen success and first appearance as a vamp was in a film called A Fool There Was (1915). With America's entry into World War I, Bara patriotically aided the war effort through public appearances, War Bond drives, and other related activities. After the armistice, her popularity declined; she retired in the 1920s into relative obscurity with her husband Charles Brabin.

Theda Bara was, and still is, a woman of mystery. Studio executives reinvented her persona with each picture she made so that even today the basic facts of her life have been called into question. Her career ended before the advent of the "talkies"; she was one of the few silent film stars who never spoke a word on screen, a fact that further adds to her allure. Sadly, only three-and-a-half of her forty movies have survived since the heyday of silent films.

Bara's contemporary, "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford (1893-1979), was probably the most recognizable of the early movie stars with her long, golden curls and child-like countenance. Little did she know when she embarked on her acting career at the age of five to help support her family, that at the height of her popularity, she would eventually demand and receive the same salaries as her male counterparts--$350,000 per picture.

Pickford was a talented and versatile actress and played a wide variety of roles--until her first appearance as a child in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). In it, the audiences fell in love with "Our Mary," and she became the embodiment of all that was good and decent and right with the world. Try as she might to leave childhood behind for more adult roles, Mary's fans refused to let her grow up and clamored for more films like Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Although she continued to play child roles until well in her thirties, Pickford was all adult on the business side of the camera. Along with soon-to-be-husband Douglas Fairbanks, actor Charlie Chaplin and director D. W. Griffith, she was a founding partner of the United Artists movie studio. One of the richest women of her time, Pickford was savvy and shrewd, easily earning $1,000,000 a year.

After appearing in several sound films and winning an Academy Award for one called Coquette, Mary retired in the 1930s and became active in philanthropy. Fearing ridicule, she eventually had most of her silent films destroyed.

Lillian Gish (1893-1993), like Pickford, embarked on her acting career at the age of five. Prior to being hired by D. W. Griffith in 1912 to act in the film An Unseen Enemy, she and her sister Dorothy played on Broadway and crisscrossed the nation with touring companies. Lillian's big break finally came in 1918 when Griffith cast her in the starring role of his classic Birth of a Nation. More memorable silent films followed--Intolerance (1916) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), for example--in addition to appearances in sound films and on television.

Generally acclaimed as the greatest actress of the silent screen, Gish was best known for her portrayals of the long-suffering heroine. Of the many adjectives used to describe her--sweet, fragile, frail, ethereal, vulnerable, innocent--none could begin to describe the inner strength and emotional force that typified her every performance.

Gish received two Oscar nominations, but never won the coveted statue. She was finally given an honorary Academy Award in 1971 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984 for a career that spanned almost nine decades. Her last film appearance was in 1987 in The Whales of August, only six years before her death at ninety-nine.

Although the Victorian era ended with the Queen's death in 1901, early female stars of the silent screen in the 1910s were still modeled after that period's ideal of womanhood. The Victorian woman was expected to be a child-woman--innocent, virtuous, dependent. The characters played by Pickford and Gish were just that, with a body image that was equally childlike--petite and delicate. In fact, both they and Theda Bara were barely five feet tall. The Victorian woman was to be childlike in character and physique, hence, controllable and easy to dominate. The characters played by Bara, on the other hand, stood in titillating opposition to Pickford and Gish. They were the personification of evil; their behavior fell outside of societal norms and thus were perceived as threatening.

Physical ideals are dependent upon and mirror changes in society. Female body image in the early years of film was still under the influence of Victorian ideals. As the nation advanced into the Jazz Age and the value structure of society was altered, the accepted definition of femininity and its corresponding body image was changed. Even today, films and their stars continue to reflect society's prevailing definitions of womanhood.