20. LILLIAN GISH (1893-1993)
One should resist the temptation to guess that Gish's name is better-remembered than most of the actresses who did their most noteworthy work during the silent era because she was such a favorite of D. W. Griffith, a director who has received (and deserved) so much of the credit for the development of the movies as an art form. In her performances for Griffith -- the titles include Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, and, of course, The Birth of a Nation -- she embodied fragile, beautiful girlhood, and had to carry out all the cliches of Victorian melodrama that make so many dramatic silent movies look ridiculous today. Yet she did it with an unearthly technique that poeticized the material and made her eternally threatened characters seem not so much frail and dainty but rather not of this world; it's as if they'd become their own ghosts without taking the customary step of first abandoning their bodies. She also made two great silents with director Victor Sjostrom, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind; the latter was a box-office failure that led to the cancellation of her MGM contract. Although she was never to enjoy anywhere near the same degree of success in talkies, she had a few notable roles spread far apart over the course of her remarkably long life and career, the most impressive being the stern, Christian spinster who holds her own against the devil, in the form of Robert Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter. Her last film appearance was in 1987's The Whales of August. She reacted to news that people were appalled she didn't get an Oscar nomination for it by saying that she really didn't mind not being put in the position of losing to Cher.
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