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Mary Pickford was a Canadian-American actress, writer, and producer who was one of the first movie stars in the world. She was known as "America's Sweetheart" and "The Girl with the Curls" because of her signature hairstyle. Mary was born in Toronto, Canada, on April 8, 1892. Pickford began her career in the film industry at the age of nine, and over the course of her career, she appeared in more than 250 films. She co-founded the film production company United Artists with Charles Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks, and she was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was also an early member of the Motion Picture Directors Association. Mary was of English and Irish descent. She began in the theater at age seven. In 1907, she adopted the family name Pickford and joined the David Belasco troupe. In 1909, she appeared in 40 movies for D.W. Griffith's American Biograph company. In 1913 she joined the Famous Players Film Company of Adolph Zukor. She then joined First National Exhibitor's Circuit in 1918. Since 1919, when she helped to establish United Artists, she worked as a producer and co-founder, with Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who would become her second husband. Pickford retired from the screen in 1933 but continued to produce. She died in 1979.

The height of the silent movie era (the 1910s-1920s) was a period of artistic innovation. Silent film stars had to use their faces to express every emotion — a skill that was lost on most actors when talkies replaced silent movies. Several silent stars including Wallace Beery, Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Greta Garbo, and Janet Gaynor made a successful transition to talkies.

By 1908 there were 10,000 permanent movie theaters in the U.S. alone. For the first thirty years, movies were silent, accompanied by live musicians, sound effects, and narration. Until World War I, movie screens were dominated by French and Italian studios. During Great War, the American movie industry center, "Hollywood," became the number one in the world. By the 1920s, the U.S. was producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total. Hollywood's system and its publicity method, the glamourous star system provided models for all movie industries. Efficient production organization enabled mass movie production and technical sophistication but not artistic expression. In 1915, in France, a group of filmmakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing which became known as French Impressionist Cinema. In Germany, dark, hallucinatory German Expressionism put internal states of mind onscreen and influenced the emerging horror genre. The Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. In Spain, Luis Buñuel embraced abstract surrealism and pure aestheticism. And, just like that, at about its peak time, the silent cinema era ended in 1926-1928.