When I wrote about the comb my mother gave me to wear at my sister's wedding (I didn't wear it after all, I'm sorry to say!) I was so tired that I started rambling on about how great Lillian Gish was and how her rosebush-beating scene in a D.W. Griffith short is the prettiest thing I've seen lately. I don't know why that came to my head at the time but I want this blog to make a bit more sense and have at least a little bit of focus, so I thought it would be a good time to scan in the Lillian Gish pages out of that silent film scrapbook and pretend that I meant to say all of that rosebush beating stuff all along.

I've mentioned Lillian before, but have never done a whole post on her, if only because she's one of the more obvious and accessible of the silent film stars and you've probably all seen lots of photographs of her already. She was definitely one of the first silent ladies that I got inspired by, way back when I first got into old films and silent movies. And she was probably one of the first actresses that I could really identify with--she looked nothing like actresses and sex symbols who were popular at the time I discovered her. She wasn't curvy, she didn't have strong features, she certainly wasn't sexy. She was small-featured and frail and innocent, and even though she was blonde-haired and my hair was possibly even darker than is today I felt that we just might have some things in common. I was never one-half as pretty as her, of course, but she made me feel better about my little mouth and my too-light blue eyes and the gawky scrawny-ness that embarrassed me all throughout high school.

I also loved the sadness about her. She was an innocent, but she didn't have the Pollyanna cheerfulness that kept me from really getting into Mary Pickford films. At her best she was serious and restrained--she could act out dramatic parts while still remaining believable. Which I think is why so many of her big dramatic scenes are so memorable, from her wandering around on the ice in Way Down East to that scene I rambled about in The Mothering Heart:

If you want to see the scene, you can fast-forward to the very end. The film is a little long, but the whole thing is really worth watching, I promise!