Abstract

Mary Pickford’s star image consists of her on-screen persona of “little Mary” and her off-screen image as Mary Pickford, the successful actress and businesswomen, co-fonder of United Artists. Both parts of her image, the sentimental, Victorian, female ideal and the modern woman of the 1910s and 1920s were to a large part written by Frances Marion. Marion did not only write the screenplays for Pickford’s most successful films, she also helped to construct her off-screen image in ghost-writing Pickford’s newspaper column “Daily Talks.” In analyzing some of these columns the article examines Pickford’s off-screen image and compares it with her screen persona. The result is an insight in the specifics of the construction of silent era star images.