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MARY PICKFORD
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Known as "America's Sweetheart" during the silent film era, she is named on the list of the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars as the 24th-top female star from the Classical Hollywood Cinema era and the "girl with the curls".
Photo Above: Mary Pickford, 1916 |
Pickford was one of the Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and a significant figure in the development of film acting. She was one of the earliest stars to be billed under her own name,[8] and was one of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, earning the nickname "Queen of the Movies". She is credited with having defined the ingénue type in cinema.
Photo Above: Mary Pickford, 1916 |
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Only Charlie Chaplin, who slightly surpassed Pickford's popularity in 1916,[24] had a similarly spellbinding pull with critics and the audience. Each enjoyed a level of fame far exceeding that of other actors. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world, or, as a silent-film journalist described her, "the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history".[
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Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith, with whom Mary Pickford founded United Artists in 1919
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House on Glenwood CrescentOn October 29, 1942, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported that construction of the "Mary Pickford Bungalow" at Glenwood Road had started the day before when Reeve John Warren of East York Township had turned the first sod.
The value of the house and property was given as $15,000. Pickford must have deduced that much more money could be raised by raffling off a new house in the new Woodbine Gardens development, a |
hidden enclave at the northern end of the massive Woodbine bridge. The bridge was built in 1932 and the Woodbine Gardens neighbourhood is located on the former site of the Woodbine Golf and Country Club which operated there during the 1930s.
Woodbine Gardens houses first sold for between $14,000 and $19,000.The first house built in this neighbourhood was the Mary Pickford War Bungalow at 90 Glenwood Crescent. |
Pickford signing the entrance to The Mary Pickford War Funds Bungalow, 1943. Photo from Digital Museums Canada.