LILLIAN GISH: THE ACTOR'S LIFE FOR ME
D: Terry Sanders (1988) ¢ ¢ ¢
Lillian Gish talks about her life and the movies, with lots of great clips, mostly from the early days of film. Gish was in her mid-90s when this turned up on public television, and she's as sharp and opinionated as ever, looking back on a career that at the time pretty much spanned the history of cinema. There are a handful of pioneers without whom silent films in particular would be unimaginable, and Gish is one of them. She was shrewd and strong-willed (a contrast to the waifs she sometimes played onscreen), and an outspoken advocate for film preservation. She outlived all of her contemporaries and died at 99 in 1993.
