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.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Golden Globes® are the registered trademark and service mark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
Steve’s Mary Pickford YouTube Video
I am zero for mary pickford with one non UMR exception . her cameo in ben hur, arguably the greatest cameo movie of all time(props to the player and its a mad mad mad mad world). with pickford, carole Lombard, joan Crawford, myrna loy, clark gable, Harold Lloyd, Samuel Goldwyn, Lillian and Dorothy gish, john gilbert, janet Gaynor, douglas Fairbanks, marion davies, gary cooper, john and lionel Barrymore, and many others. great job Steve.
Added Steve’s Mary Pickford YouTube video to the page.
Good video. The name Mary Pickford is know by film buffs but sadly most of her movies have been forgotten. I have not seen a single Pickford movie. She was a great business person as well. Voted up and shared .
Hi Bruce, I’m in the same boat, I haven’t seen any of her films either. But I’ve known her name ever since I was a fledgling film buff. Flora has seen 5 of the 25.
Making these videos has been a huge learning curve for me. Thanks as always for the vote, share and comment, it is appreciated.
Fantastic spread of STILLS and LOBBY CARDS on Steve’s welcome return. My personal picks:
1/Pioneers
2/Kiki
3/2 for Coquette
4/Rosita
5/Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
6/Through the Back Door – some quaint titles in those days!
7/The Hoodlum
8/Secrets
9/Little Lord Fauntleroy as well
10/Tess of Storm County [1922 version – Mary made another version back in 1914]
11/ Taming of the Shrew
12/Pollyanna
13/My Best Girl
14/Sparrows
15/Stella Maris
16/historically highly nostalgic opening one of the 4 founders of United Artists in 1919: Chaplin/Fairbanks/Pickford and D W Griffith. Charlie and Mary hated each other as she kept trying to prevent him from gatecrashing her high-society parties to prey on very young girls as she saw it.
17/two closing ones that brilliantly illustrate how lovely the young Mary looked.
Fantastic spread of STILLS and LOBBY CARDS on Steve’s welcome return. My personal picks:
1/Pioneers
2/Kiki
3/2 for Coquette
4/Rosita
5/Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
6/Through the Back Door – some quaint titles in those days!
7/The Hoodlum
8/Secrets
9/Little Lord Fauntleroy as well
10/Tess of Storm County [1922 version – Mary made another version back in 1914]
11/ Taming of the Shrew
12/Pollyanna
13/My Best Girl
14/Sparrows
15/Stella Maris
16/historically highly nostalgic opening one of the 4 founders of United Artists in 1919: Chaplin/Fairbanks/Pickford and D W Griffith. Charlie and Mary hated each other as she kept trying to prevent him from gatecrashing her high-society parties to prey on very young girls as she saw it.
17/two closing ones that brilliantly illustrate how lovely the young Mary looked.
BEST POSTERS IN MARY’s VIDEO – Very rare visuals – Simply fantastic!
1/Romance of Redwoods
2/2 for Little American
3/2 for Rosita
4/2 for Dorothy Vernon
5/1st one for Lovelight
6/Little Myrna Rooney
7/Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
8/2 for Little Princess
9/2 for Through the Back Door
10/M’Liss
11/Little Lord Fauntleroy
12/Tess of Storm County [1922]
13/All for Taming of Shrew
14/Daddy Ladd Legs
15/My Best Girl
16/Sparrows
17/Stella Maris