"As someone who worked with and knew Lillian Gish for years, I found Charles Affron’s portrait revealing and moving. He rekindles the life of this intuitive and generous artist beautifully."—Eva Marie Saint

This work sheds light on the life and works of Lillian Gish, an American actress, director, and screenwriter known as the "First Lady of American Cinema." Her film career spanned 75 years, from silent film shorts to 1987. Her notable films from the silent era include The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and Way Down East (1920). Gish acted on stage with her sister as a child and was particularly associated with the films of D.W. Griffith. Moreover, she was an advocate for the preservation of silent film and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972.

With a theatrical career spanning nearly 100 years, Gish saw motion pictures evolve from flickers to blockbusters. Usually playing someone needing to be rescued or protected, her trademark delicacy and vulnerability belied a strong and complex woman whose fatherless childhood taught her frugality, love for her mother and her sister, Dorothy, and a distrust of men. The author, who was her friend, chronicles the hardships, heartaches, and fierce determination that shaped her all her days. With rare photographs and intimate recollections of Lillian, Dorothy, and many other important figures.

Life and Lillian Gish

Upon its original publication in 1962, Edward Wagenknecht's The Movies in the Age of Innocence immediately earned recognition as a classic in the history of early cinema. A tribute to American silent film from the first-person perspective of one who grew up with the medium, the volume surveys the pre-feature and feature era of silent films from a distinctly literary standpoint and considers the careers of directors like D. W. Griffith and Erich von Stroheim, and actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. With nearly 90 illustrations from early films, fan magazines and brochures, indices of film titles and names, and an appendix containing Wagenknecht's otherwise unavailable 1927 pamphlet Lillian Gish: An Interpretation, this third edition retains its significance today.