By Henji Milius
More than a century after her birth, Mary Pickford is back in the limelight. The TIFF Bell Lightbox has a display of memorabilia devoted to the starlet, as well as a mini-film festival.
Born in Toronto in 1892, Pickford made the move from stage to screen and was the first film actor to negotiate a million dollar contract with a studio. She earned a lifetime achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just three years before her death in 1979.
This first exhibit in the new Canadian Film Gallery at the Lightbox showcases 300 items ranging from a white cotton dress to personalized cutlery all donated from the private collection of a Mississauga film fan on a mission to keep Pickford’s memory alive.
“I want the public to know that she was one of us,” says Rob Brooks, the collection’s owner and president of Bloo & Wite Media Inc., a digital media consulting company. The exhibit opened January 13 and by mid-April nearly 10,000 visitors had viewed the display. Sylvia Frank, director and curator of the reference library at the Lightbox, is expecting interest to continue right up until the close in July. A retrospective of Pickford’s films is also playing until then.
Sweetheart, a musical tribute to Pickford, ran for 17 days in February at the Spadina Museum in Toronto. Written in 1998, and directed by Mimi Mekler, the musical performance was a recreation of Pickford’s tumultuous love life with her three husbands as well as her ambitious career. Composer Dean Burry says the “music is there to tell how she is feeling”.
Mary Pickford in a signed picture - Photo by Henji Milius
Known as “Canada’s sweetheart”, Pickford performed in 193 films from 1909 to 1933. According to Hugh Munro Neele, curator at the Mary Pickford Library at the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education, “she was able to control her contracts very carefully. She worked with her mother in that respect. Nobody handed those things to her.”
In 1919, Pickford founded a distribution company called United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. The company would serve filmmakers and not the studios, according to Neel’s profile of Pickford on the institute’s website.
Mary Pickford Weekend will be held May 14 and 15 at the TIFF Lightbox and will include a tour of the exhibition and a special screening of My Best Girl (1927), Pickford’s last silent film.
