Was promised a million bucks for every film she made
First filthy-rich actress. Good for her.
shareAlso started her own studio (United Artists) with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. Smart lady.
shareYeah. Sad how the talkies basically ended her career.
shareI wonder if that by that point she was just tired of the movie business. She was wealthy enough that she didn't need to work anymore. And her voice sounded perfectly fine in "Coquette."
Think the same thing happened to Clara Bow. It was said the industry decided to ignore her, but her biographies suggest she was happy to retire and become a rancher. Her voice sounded perfectly fine in "Call Her Savage" and she was still a very beautiful woman.
I don't think it was really a case of their voices sounding bad as much as hearing their actual voices simply destroyed the illusion in the minds of the audience. You had years of people imagining what they sounded like. And when that is what takes place the build up is going to be to perfection in the minds of the audience... and then when they hear the actual voice and it fails to meet their expectations it is just a big let down. Remember this was a time when accents across the US were much stronger than they are today because there was no television to help homogenize the masses so you can imagine each area of the country had people thinking the actresses sounded like the girl next door... and then they didn't sound like the girl next door they sounded like some out of towner.
shareGood point. For the really famous silent actresses (Pickford, Bow, Gish), their fame actually worked against them with the coming of sound because, as you rightly point out, so many moviegoers had already imagined what their voices should sound like. Conversely, some lesser-known silent actresses like Jean Arthur went on to have bright careers in talkies because audiences didn't have any preconceived notions about them.
shareSadly many performers lost their careers to talkies. Especially men with high pitched voices, and people with foreign accents.
shareMakes me think of the Lina Lamont character from Singing in the Rain. She was a hoot. Pretty sure they based the character on Clara Bow.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2020/04/03/clara-bow/
I never saw "Call Her Savage",but have seen many of her silents.I. read she spoke with a heavy Brooklyn accent, and her diction was not the greatest. Many of the silent stars did drop out of school when fame beckoned. But I had a chance to see one of her videos with her husband Rex. She sounded OK to me.
shareActually, Pickford's career as an actress had been on a downward curve in the late 1920s. She'd built her career on playing childlike ingenues, was typecast as the kind of old-fashioned girlie that was out of fashion in the age of the flapper, and the public hadn't really taken to her campaign to expand her range and change her image. And she was in her mid-thirties by the time the Talkies rolled in. Hollywood was as ageist as hell back then, most actresses knew their careers would be over by 25 or 30, Pickford had an unusually long career as a leading actress, by the standards of the time.
So she was smart to go into film production when the talkies came in and she started pushing forty, co-founded a movie studio that's still in business!
Jodie Foster and Reese Witherspoon both made similar pivots. Smart ladies.
shareA lot of actors do, that's one reason Brad Pitt has had such a long career, for instance, he's got a production company that has produced a lot of major films.
The thing about actors is that they know that acting is a time-limited job for a lot of them, that most will need to find something else to do while they're still in the prime of life. So the smart ones learn to direct, or become film producers, and Mary Pickford was arguable both the first and most successful at transitioning from acting to production.