charlie-oscar2A weekly feature in which my four-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier.

marypickford-oscarWith less than a month until the 86th Academy Awards Presentation, Charlie clearly has the Oscars on his mind with his pick this week of movie pioneer Mary Pickford. The renowned actress was one of the 36 original founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927 and she herself won two Oscars — a Best Actress award in 1930 for her role in the film Coquette and an honorary lifetime achievement award in 1976. By the late 1920s, Pickford was already an established veteran of the movie industry — she first appeared in front of the camera way back in 1909, during the infancy of the art form.

Born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto, Canada, on April 8, 1892, Pickford started her movie career under the tutelage of director D.W. Griffith when she was just a teenager. After a few years with Griffith’s Biograph Company, Pickford started working at Carl Laemmle’s studio which soon became Universal. She then moved to Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Company and her fame as “America’s Sweetheart” continued to skyrocket.

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In 1919, Mary Pickford became one of the film industry’s earliest female studio heads when she joined director D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to form United Artists. For most of her career, Pickford oversaw all aspects of her films, including writing, casting, production and promotion. While many of Pickford’s films have been lost to time, some of her more famous movies include Tess of the Storm Country (1914 and remade in 1922), The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Pollyanna (1920), Little Annie Rooney (1925) and My Best Girl (1927). Like many silent screen icons, Pickford’s career suffered with the advent of talking films. She initially derided the concept (“Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo”) and despite winning an Oscar for her first talkie, she only made three films after that. But while Pickford retired as an actress following the release of her final film, Secrets, in 1933, she stayed active in the industry, producing films for United Artists for decades to come, and working tirelessly to support various foundations that were set up to help people in the industry.

homepickfair3During the course of her well-publicized career, Pickford married three actors: Owen Moore in 1911, Douglas Fairbanks in 1920, and  Charles “Buddy” Rogers in 1937. She remained married to Rogers until her death on May 29, 1979 at the age of 87. When she married Douglas Fairbanks, an enormous star in his own right, they became the world’s first superstar celebrity couple, written about endlessly in fan magazines and mobbed wherever they went. Pickford and Fairbanks built a huge mansion in Beverly Hills they called Pickfair that became a hub of Hollywood’s social scene throughout the 1920s. Mary hosted countless dinner parties at Pickfair, with illustrious guests including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller, Charles Lindbergh, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Amelia Earhart, and, of course, everyone who was anyone in the Hollywood film community. Though she and Fairbanks, divorced in 1936, Mary remained at Pickfair for the rest of her life. In the 1980s the home was purchased by actress Pia Zadora and her husband who shamefully demolished the one-of-a-kind structure. Zadora later claimed that she razed the house because it was inhabited by ghosts.

Today the Mary Pickford Foundation continues the philanthropic efforts that Pickford was involved with throughout her life and also educates new generations about Mary Pickford’s astounding achievements in the motion picture industry.