Dorothy Gish

Dorothy Elizabeth Gish was born on March 11, 1898, in Dayton, Ohio, and died on June 4, 1968. An American actress who worked in both film and theater, she built a career spanning silent cinema and the Broadway stage, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Gish's family circumstances shaped her early life considerably. Her mother, Mary, had worked as an actress and department store clerk, and after her husband James Leigh Gish, a traveling salesman, abandoned the family in New York, Mary relocated with her daughters Dorothy and elder sister Lillian to East St. Louis, Illinois, where she established a candy and catering business. At the age of four, in 1902, Dorothy made her stage debut in East Lynne, an adaptation of the 1861 Ellen Wood novel, playing the character Little Willie.

The sisters' entry into film came through a connection to their childhood friend, actress Mary Pickford, who introduced them to director D. W. Griffith. They began working as extras at Biograph Studios in New York, each earning fifty dollars a week. Because Griffith initially had difficulty telling the sisters apart, he assigned Lillian a blue ribbon to wear in her hair and Dorothy a red one. Their joint screen debut came in Griffith's 1912 production An Unseen Enemy, and Dorothy would go on to appear in more than one hundred short films and features over the course of her screen career, frequently alongside Lillian.

Throughout her film work, Dorothy contended with persistent comparisons to her elder sister from critics, studio executives, and industry figures. Those comparisons began at Biograph itself. Griffith's first wife, Linda Arvidson, recalled in her autobiography When the Movies Were Young that Dorothy spent considerable time doing extra work while receiving little attention from the director, though Arvidson noted that many observers ultimately considered Dorothy the stronger performer of the two.

On the day after Thanksgiving in 1914, Dorothy's career was nearly cut short when, at sixteen years old, she was struck by an automobile at the intersection of Vermont and Prospect avenues in Los Angeles while walking with Lillian. The car dragged her approximately forty to fifty feet along the street. D. W. Griffith was among the bystanders who witnessed the accident and reportedly helped lift the unconscious actress into an ambulance. Her injuries included a crushed right foot, a deep cut on her right side, and extensive bruising; surgeons treated a severely torn left side with numerous stitches and addressed the loss of a toe. The accident delayed completion of the two-reel comedy How Hazel Got Even, which had been filming at Reliance-Majestic Studios under director Donald Crisp. Originally scheduled for release on December 27, 1914, the film was not distributed until mid-February 1915.

After recovering, Gish returned to work in 1915, appearing in two- and three-reel shorts as well as longer productions including the five-reel Old Heidelberg, directed by John Emerson, and Jordan Is a Hard Road, again under Griffith. By June of that year, Motion Picture Magazine identified her as one of the most popular film stars working in the medium. In 1916 and 1917 she starred in five-reel productions for Fine Arts Film Company, a Griffith subsidiary of Triangle Film Corporation, filming on locations in both New York and on the West Coast. Her comedic instincts found a significant early showcase in the 1918 wartime film Hearts of the World, in which she played a street singer called the little disturber. The role was widely regarded as the highlight of the film and established her reputation as a skilled comedian. That reputation extended throughout her silent film work, during which many of her projects were comedies.

Gish's Broadway career ran from 1928 to 1950 and encompassed a range of productions. Her stage credits included The Manxman, The Great Big Doorstep, The Magnificent Yankee, The Story of Mary Surratt, and Fool's Love, among others. Her work in theater reinforced the comedic gifts she had demonstrated on screen, and her contributions to the American stage were recognized through her induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame.