Want to know the best Mary Pickford movies? How about the worst Mary Pickford movies? Curious about Mary Pickford box office grosses or which Mary Pickford movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Mary Pickford movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which ones got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place…. because we have all of that information and much more.
Mary Pickford (1892-1979) was an Canadian actress, who the American Film Institute ranked as one of the Top 50 Screen Legends of all time. Pickford is ranked as the 24th best actress, right behind #23 Carole Lombard and right before #25 Ava Gardner. Pickford’s IMDb page shows 251 acting credits from 1909-1933. This page will rank 31 Mary Pickford movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Every full length Pickford movie from 1919 to 1933 is listed in the following table. All of her short films and some of her full length movies from 1913 to 1918 were not included.
Want to know how popular Mary Pickford was back in her heyday? Combine Sandra Bullock’s box office muscle, with Meryl Streep’s acting acclaim, with Angelina Jolie’s paparazzi status and Reese Witherspoon’s girl next door persona..and you might get close to how big she was from 1910 to 1930.
Drivel part of the page: We have written hundreds of these movie pages. Not finding box office information is not unusual. Picking a movie subject, that made most of their movies, before the Oscars® even existed is rare but has happened before. What has not happened before, is getting shut out when it comes to movie reviews. That however, is what happened while researching this page. Many of the Pickford movies have not been seen by anybody in over 80 years. Way too many of her movies are considered “lost forever”. Hard to rank her movies when we are missing all three main factors in our movie ranking formula!
Mary Pickford Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Mary Pickford movies by year the movie was made
- Sort Mary Pickford movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Mary Pickford movies by actual domestic box office grosses (in millions)
- Sort Mary Pickford movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Mary Pickford movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and Oscar® wins each Mary Pickford movie received.
- Sort Mary Pickford movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Use the sort and search buttons to make this table very interactive.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Mary Pickford Table
- Twenty-two Mary Pickford movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 70.96% of her movies listed. Daddy Long Legs (1919) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Mary Pickford movie grossed $137.20 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 24 of Mary Pickford’s movies are rated as good movies…or 77.41% of her movies. The Little Princess (1917) was her highest rated movie while Rosita (1923) was her lowest rated movie.
- One Mary Pickford movie received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 3.22% of her movies.
- One Mary Pickford movie won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 3.22% of her movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00. 30 Mary Pickford movies scored higher that average….or 96.77% of her movies. Daddy Long Legs (1919) got the the highest UMR Movie Score while M’Liss (1918) got the lowest UMR Movie Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Mary Pickford
1. Gladys Louise Smith was born in Toronto, Canada in 1892. Stage producer David Belasco gave Mary her stage name in 1908. “Gladys” did not suit the diminutive actress, “Smith” was too common, “Marie” (her baptized middle name) was too foreign. “Marie” became “Mary”. “Pickford” was her mother’s maiden name.
2. Growing up Mary Pickford’s next door neighbor was fellow AFI Screen Legend, Lillian Gish.
3. Mary Pickford was married three times and had 2 children. She was married to Douglas Fairbanks from 1920 to 1936. Their marriage was talk of the town. Pretty much the “Brangelina” of the 1920s and 1930s. The mansion the two lived in was called Pickfair. Pickfair for a very long time was considered the 2nd most famous house in America…only the White House was more famous.
4. Mary Pickford was Joan Crawford‘s mother-in-law, while Crawford was married to Pickford’s son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr..
5. Mary Pickford’s path to fame: (1) In 1907 she won a supporting role in a Broadway play. (2) In 1909 D.W. Griffith screen-tested her for a movie, but did not give her the part. (3) Griffith, however did start using Pickford in his short films. From 1909 to 1911 they made 87 shorts together. (4) Pickford became known worldwide as the “Girl With The Curls” (4) In 1913 she started appearing in full length feature films. (5) Her 5th full length movie, 1914’s Tess of the Storm Country, was a monster hit. (6) Pickford would remain a star the rest of her life.
6. Mary Pickford nicknames: “The Girl with the Golden Hair”, “The Glad Girl”, America’s Sweetheart,
Little Mary and “Girl With The Curls”
7. Mary Pickford was the 2nd actress to receive an Academy Award®; she won the Best Actress Oscar® for 1929’s Coquette. Pickford only made 4 “talkies”…Coquette was one of those four movies.
8. Mary Pickford’s first television appearance was when she gave Cecil B. DeMille his Oscar® for 1952’s The Greatest Show On Earth. She and DeMille made two movies together in 1917.
9. Mary Pickford firsts. First star (along with husband Douglas Fairbanks) to place hand and footprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. She was the first movie actress to receive a percentage of a film’s earnings. The first artist to have her name in marquee lights.
10. Mary Pickford formed United Artists company with Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith and Charles Chaplin. She had intended to have all of her films destroyed after her death, fearing that no one would care about them. She was convinced not to do this….but by the time she turned over the prints to her movies many were beyond restoration and were lost forever.
Check out Mary Pickford’s movie career compared to current and classic stars on our Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time page.
America Film Institutes’ Top 25 Screen Legend Actress and UMR’s Links That Rank All Of Their Movies.
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Steve’s Mary Pickford YouTube Video
Hi
Congratulations on finishing your list. I have to admit, Miss Pickford is the only superstar who’s films I haven’t seen. I’ve watched several documentaries on her life and there’s no doubt shes a giant of the silver screen. But I think to most people today she’s just a name.
Thanks Chris. Pickford was the last one. I was banging my head on the wall trying to figure out her box office grosses in 1913…..when I realized that nobody had seen these movies in so many years that there was nobody left to review them. So when I realized that I could not even get the critical rating part of the equation…it made it easy to finish the page. It is amazing and sad that her work is almost gone. There are copies out there…but I have not stumbled across her movies…and I watch about 700 movies a year….yet no Pickford movies. I agree with you 100% that she is just a name in history. Between you, me and Steve Lensman (whom I all consider to be serious movie buffs)…we have seen 0 of her movies. Only Flora at 7 has a decent number. That is sad. One day I know I will see Coquette….as it is one of the few Best Actress Oscar winning movies that I have not seen. Thanks for sharing your Pickford thoughts.
I could scream!
I had a long comment about my love of Mary Pickford and now it is gone.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
So instead, I have seen seven of her movies.
My favourite is The Love Light.
I’m a big fan of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and her stepson Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Hey Flora…sorry your comment disappeared. I have that problem on Steve’s You Tube channel….I have lost many a comment over there too. So I feel your pain. So with your tally of 7…that means you, me and Steve have seen 7 Pickford movies. We could not have reached such great heights without the help of my and Steve. I however plan on tracking down at least one Pickford movie in the near future. Her time with Fairbanks almost seem magical when you revisit that time in history. As always…thanks for sharing your Pickford thoughts.
Congratulations!
I will talk about Mary Pickford films in a second.
But first – Mary Pickford was born in Canada in on Ontario!
You have been writing things like Canadian-born American etc. on others, sooo…
By the way, she decided that she wanted her remains to be in Canada.
Thanks Flora for the congrats. I gave Pickford her proper credit as a Canadian….sorry about that. I read that she became an American citizen….but we she got older she wanted to die a Canadian….so the Canadian government made that happen. I wonder if my mom wants to do the same thing?
Congrats on completing your quest Bruce! It can’t have been easy finding all the box office figures for these Hollywood legends. Well done amigo.
No one today can imagine how popular Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were 90 years ago! That said I’ve been up and down your chart and can’t find a single film I’ve seen, I’m at 0 too! I have seen Pickford in movie documentaries, does that count? 🙂
So I can’t complain about the UMR rankings this time, damn! Daddy Long Legs is no.1 whatever that is. I’ve seen the Fred Astaire movie of the same name.
The only film I would be interested in seeing from here is The Taming of the Shrew (1929) which also starred her hubby Fairbanks. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor starred in their version of the play in the late 60s.
Good work Bruce. Ironic that my last AFI actor tally is zero. Voted Up!
play
Hey Steve….thank you for the congrats. Finding her box office for the 1920s was actually pretty easy. But once it got to the 1910s the sledding got tough. She was huge back then…which makes it so surprising that she did not end up with an all-time great movie. As you say…Daddy Long Legs is the number one movie….but it is not one even movie buffs are aware off. It was the only one of her movies that reached the 1 million mark in rentals. She was a strong critic of her own work….and she really disliked The Taming of the Shrew….but I bet it is still a good one to watch.
Wow combined we are at 0 when it comes to the tally count. Do we have to turn in our movie buff card? Flora at 7 destroyed us yet again.
I will be the first one to comment on my last AFI page. Sad to say my tally count is 0. I have not seen a single Pickford movie….but I will fix that issue very soon. Doing the happy dance….finally done with this quest.