Vintage style icons: Lillian Gish

Lillian Gish was one of cinema’s first female stars. Her innocent beauty on screen matched with her hard-working attitude and business sense made for career that spanned over seven decades. Louise Black takes a closer look at this vintage style icon.

Think of the Twenties and you’ll surely envisage naughty flappers with Marcel waves, painted faces and bare ankles, dancing the Charleston like Josephine Baker to raucous jazz music with a cigarette in one hand and a Whiskey Sour in the other. But much of this razzle dazzle was a reaction against a more conservative establishment that prized temperance, sexual abstinence and purity, particularly in women.

Appearing in her first film (An Unseen Enemy in 1912) at the age of 19, Lillian Gish was one of the first generation of screen goddesses, providing an important link to fading Victorian values for the cinema-going masses  who might otherwise have found later stars like Joan Crawford, Clara Bow and their glittering ilk too radically modern. With wide blue eyes, rosebud lips and a flowing mane of curls, Gish’s appearance on the silent screen epitomised an ethereal, vulnerable, natural beauty that represented traditional female purity and integrity in the face of a modern, changing world.

For the first 13 years of her career Gish worked with pioneering director DW Griffith who repeatedly cast her as the suffering heroine, often seen fending off advances from lascivious brutes, escaping abusive relations and rescuing the innocent waifs from certain ruin. With Griffith at the helm, Gish became one of the best-loved faces on the silent screen, while behind the scenes she was a successful, independent career woman who had worked hard since childhood and remained unmarried until her death in 1993 at the age of 99.

 

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Tags: Lillian Gish, vintage style icon

Category: Pre-1930s, Vintage news, Vintage Style Icons