Lillian Gish

Vanity Fair

flashback

July 1932

She was as old as the cinema itself. And the last of its first great stars. The Lillian Gish Persona, the wilting orchid with a stem of steel—her inevitable role in classics such as The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Orphans of the Storm, and several other epic masterworks by her mentor, D. W. Griffith—is engraved in the celluloid psyches of a nation that has been crazed about the movies all of her life. Soft focus was literally invented for Gish, but only to accentuate her naturally dreamy aura. As Griffith's favorite heroine, she was often the first to embark on screen adventures that became lasting standards. Since she clung to an ice floe and faced death-bywaterfall in Way Down East (1920), how many other ingenues have found themselves flailing in the drink? And mind you, there were no glass mattes or stunt doubles for Lillian, who cozied up to her very own floe in a very real frozen river. "Snow and ice and little spikes formed on my eyelashes," she recalled. Anything for Mr. Griffith.