In 1969, Lillian Gish published a book entitled “Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me,” dedicated to the three people who had the most influence on her life: “To my mother who gave me love. To my sister who taught me to love; to my father who gave me insecurity; to D. W. Griffith who taught me it was more fun to work than to play.”

Gish had one of the longest screen collaborations with director D.W. Griffith. She was introduced to him by her friend Gladys Smith (soon to be renamed Mary Pickford), and Griffith hired her and her sister Dorothy to be extras for $5 in his An Unseen Enemy, a one-reel film he directed in 1912. Because the two girls were so alike, Griffith insisted he couldn’t tell them apart and made them wear blue and red ribbons in their hair, shouting instructions at ‘Blue’ and ‘Red.’ But his Biograph studio was Gish’s training ground for her career. “We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and we liked it because it was so interesting … We were all one family. We were after one thing: to get whatever that was up on the canvas perfect,” she told a reporter. She and Griffith made 60 films together in nine years.

In a Los Angeles Times interview, Gish said: “We never had a script. He (Griffith) had nothing written. You were in a room, he called out the plot, and you ran through it over and over and over until you found the character. He said: ‘I can’t be bothered with the character; you find it.’ He didn’t want to discuss it with you.” “He didn’t direct me,” she continued to the LA Times. “He said: ‘It doesn’t matter. She’ll do what she pleases anyway.’”

Gish was born in Springfield, Ohio on October 14, 1893. After her father abandoned the family, her mother took Gish and her sister to New York and supported them by running a boarding house and appearing on the stage under a pseudonym because acting was considered a shameful profession. The young girls were also put on stage, Lillian before she was 10 years old, billed as ‘Baby Lillian’ “just so we could keep the name from being used and not disgrace the family,” recalled Gish in the LA Times interview. The girls were never allowed to tell anyone what they did to earn a living. She told the New York Times about those years on the stage, “The only acting lesson we ever had was to speak loud and clear. We were told that if we didn’t, they’ll get another little girl, and they would have.”

In Griffith’s early one-reel films, Gish played the delicate, ethereal heroine who suffered greatly from life’s slings and arrows. She soon learned to do away with the declamatory acting style that stage thespians used on film. She acted with restraint and soulfulness, developing a signature style of pensive gestures and looks that were showcased in the first closeups to ever be seen on film, earning her the moniker ‘First Lady of the Silent Screen.’ She appeared in most of Griffith’s important feature films – Intolerance (1916) in which she played a supporting role as the Eternal Motherhood; Broken Blossoms (1919) in which she has a notable death scene in which she is beaten to death by her father for befriending a Chinese man; Way Down East (1919) in which Gish lay on an ice block in a river for weeks of shooting in winter resulting in permanent nerve damage in her fingers; Orphans of the Storm (1922) set in the French Revolution; but most importantly, she played Elsie Stoneman, a Northern belle, daughter of a Yankee abolitionist, in the controversial Civil War film Birth of a Nation in 1915 which she maintained was not racist to her dying day.

(Because of her role in Birth, the DGA stripped Gish of her lifetime achievement award in 1999. And the Black students of Bowling Green State University campaigned to have Gish’s name (and her sister’s) stripped from a campus cinema for the same reason, even though stars like James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, and Martin Scorsese put out a statement protesting the action.)

In 1920, Gish directed a film, Remodeling Her Husband, starring her sister Dorothy for which she wrote the story under a pseudonym with subtitles by Dorothy Parker, and served as editor and costume designer. According to the LA Times, “Not only did she direct, she said, “but I wrote the story, designed the sets, rented all the furniture. I made it in 28 days, and it made money.” The movie cost $58,000 and netted $160,000.” The film is lost now, a circumstance that caused Gish to be a lifelong supporter of film preservation.

After a salary dispute, Gish left Griffith and Biograph and signed a million-dollar contract with MGM for five pictures, of which three were La Boheme (1926), The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928), her last silent film. Her contract allowed her creative control, a first for an actress till then.

Gish left MGM and went back on stage in the 1930s and 1940s as her film career languished with the advent of sound, and she refused to acquiesce to Louis B. Mayer’s demand that the studio concocts a scandal to put her in the headlines. “I never approved of talkies,” she told a reporter. “Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomime, but something wonderfully expressive.”

She played in Uncle Vanya on Broadway in 1930 and Ophelia to John Gielgud’s Hamlet in 1936, as well as Life with Father in 1939. She made her television debut in 1948 in The Late Christopher Bean and did several guest spots on other television shows for the next few years. She continued to appear in acclaimed films such as Duel in the Sun (1946), The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Unforgiven (1960).

Her 80-year career continued into the 1980s with appearances in Robert Altman’s A Wedding in 1978, Alan Alda’s Sweet Liberty in 1986, and arguably her finest work, The Whales of August opposite Bette Davis in 1987. She was 90 then.

While Gish never appeared in an Oscar-winning film, she did receive an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in film in 1971.  She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. She was ranked No. 19 on The American Film Institute’s list of the 50 Greatest American Female Screen Legends in1999.

Upon her death in 1993 at the age of 99, Gish left her estate to her friend Helen Hayes, also bestowing funds to the Museum of Modern Art to restore the films of D.W. Griffith. (Hayes barely survived her by 18 days.) Gish was interred at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York next to her sister. She had never married and had no children.