For some sixty years the name Mary Pickford has evoked an image of golden curls and angelic innocence. She began her acting career as a child to support her widowed mother, sister and brother, and it was when this extremely impoverished family moved from Canada to New York that impresario David Belasco gave this curly-haired girl the name that became world renowned.

Playing innocent but mischievous roles in silent movies, Mary Pickford also earned a name for 'toughness', striking very hard barg...ains off-screen whilst charming thousands on.

In this the first major biography of Hollywood's first true superstar,Scott Eyman looks beneath her innocent facade and reveals a woman at least fifty years ahead of her time: a woman who acted, wrote and produced; who created the star system in Hollywood; who, along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D W Griffith, founded United Artists. She was also a woman whose career made it impossible to live with the man she loved, and who paid and paid for her prodigious success, paving the way for the later successes of such stars as Jane Fonda and Jessica Lange.

Until now the reality behind the name Mary Pickford has remained elusive. The highest paid and most famous woman of her era, she never appeared before the camera after the age of forty, opting instead to produce films in the last fifteen years of her career for United Artists.

What drove this diminutive Canadian to become consumed by her career and to assume power in a way that was unheard of for a woman until half a century later? And why did she then walk away from that eminence and begin buying up all her old films with the intention of burning them? As Scott Eyman shows in this fascinating portrait, Mary Pickford's achievements were legion, but the price she paid was high. His thorough and absorbing biography recreates her astonishing and sometimes heartbreaking life and gives an engaging overview of the greatest era in Hollywood's checkered history.