All All. Sign In. Classic Film Actresses. List activity. Lillian Gish. Her father, James Lee Gish, was an alcoholic who caroused, was rarely at home, and left the family to, more or less, fend for themselves. Mary Robinson McConnell, tried their hand at acting in local productions. Lillian was six years old when she first appeared in front of an audience.
For the next 13 years, she and Dorothy appeared before stage audiences with great success. Had she not made her way into films, Lillian quite possibly could have been one of the great stage actresses of all time; however, she found her way onto the big screen when, in , she met famed director D. She would make 12 films for Griffith in With 25 films in the next two years, Lillian's exposure to the public was so great that she fast became one of the top stars in the industry, right alongside Mary Pickford , "America's Sweetheart".
She was not making the large number of films that she had been in the beginning because she was successful and popular enough to be able to pick and choose the right films to appear in. The following year, she appeared in another Griffith classic, Intolerance By the early s, her career was on its way down. As with anything else, be it sports or politics, new faces appeared on the scene to replace the "old", and Lillian was no different.
In fact, she did not appear at all on the screen in , or As the decade wound to a close, "talkies" were replacing silent films. However, Lillian was not idle during her time away from the screen. She appeared in stage productions, to the acclaim of the public and critics alike. In , she filmed His Double Life , but did not make another film for nine years.
When she returned in , she appeared in two big-budget pictures, Commandos Strike at Dawn and Top Man Although these roles did not bring her the attention she had had in her early career, Lillian still proved she could hold her own with the best of them. One of the most critically acclaimed roles of her career came in the thriller The Night of the Hunter , also notable as the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton. In , she published her autobiography, "The Movies, Mr.
