Lillian Gish

  1893-1993  

Lillian Gish was one of Hollywood's first movie stars. She played the female lead in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, a 1917 film often called the first feature length movie, equally praised for pioneering filmaking techniques, and reviled for undermining race relations and boosting the membership of the Ku Klux Klan.

Much later, she played the tough old lady who saved the children and defeated the villain
in 1955's The Night of the Hunter.

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Silent Film Stars