Lillian Gish

Coming up, Futurama's Billy West shows you his old house.

When I thought of who on earth could have lived in that house, it might have been a silent movie star because there was another one that lived on the street named Lillian Gish.

That was the beauty of living right there.

Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal, they were all there.

The doorways had arches like the old style, stucco walls and old fixtures.

In other words, this house was there before the Oscars.

And supposedly, silent movie star Lillian Gish lived on my street.

I got into the house.

I think he's very, very good in this film.

And you talk about the older lady, Lillian Gish, who was a huge star in...

in the 1910s she was in birth of a nation intolerance like all dw griffiths massive block she was the star and all dw griffiths massive films charles lawton cast her because he said when he was a kid and he used to go to the cinema uh you used to sit upright and proper in the cinema and watch what's on screen Whereas nowadays, people slouch over a bucket of popcorn and glance at the screen, and he wanted people to be forced to sit upright again, which is great.

Her character, who is introduced at the end of the film or in the latter half of the film, Miss Cooper, is fantastic.

You've touched on religion.

The film opens with a woman who we meet later on.

It's Lillian Gish's character who tells these children about false prophets in sheep's clothing who are wolves inside.

And as she's saying this on screen, we see preacher Harry Pell driving in the countryside.

At one point, I, I did Trip to Bountiful, uh, the, uh, Horton Foote play.

First it was a television, then he wrote, rewrote it as a play, with Lillian Gish.

And, uh, Kazan, uh, saw me in that part.

Uh, Martin Jurro, my agent, sent Kazan to see me in that, and he saw it and, uh, thought of me as the young virginal blonde in On The Waterfront.

But you know what, as usual, favourite silent films, there's loads of them.

There's The Scarlet Letter with Lillian Gish, which is absolutely amazing, which I saw years ago, which has always blown my socks off really about how amazing she is in that.

But once again, it's a film very hard to show, really, because it's only available on C5.

No one's done a decent DCP of it.

That's right, if you were born on this day in history, and we got a couple of good ones here.

You share a birthday with Lillian Gish.

She was a silent film star, and Lillian Gish, of course, synonymous with film and so forth.

Born in 1893, and she passed away in 1993.

Imagine the things that you see living through a century of time like that.

They would see, you know, the advent of new technologies and flight and all kinds of stuff.

Computer technology.

Can you imagine, you know, the advent of the personal computer? these amazing wonderful things and so again you share a birthday here on this october the 14th with lillian gish also you see our birthday born in 1939 ralph loren he's the american fashion designer and of course uh you see his name everywhere on all kinds of stuff from clothing to uh you know accessories and all kinds of things every christmas if you go shopping somebody at the uh at the uh the different counters uh you know that you have ralph lauren perfume and stuff like that that people might buy their wives shall we say we never know uh or actually i think it's a men's cologne to be honest uh but nevertheless uh you see his name everywhere as a designer Also, Grammy winning R&B and pop star Usher was born in 1978 on October the 14th.

At that time, Gerda Garber was a goddess.

In 1987, on location in Maine, a director complimented 94-year-old screen legend Lillian Gish on her close-up, and her co-star, the 79-year-old Betty Davis, quipped, Of course it's a good close-up.

The bitch invented the close-up.

Now, according to Betty, Lillian Gish might have been the first one to audibly dazzle audiences in a close-up on screen, but for me, it's always been Greta Garbo who really invented the close-up and helped cement a new style of acting in a way that movie history won't ever forget.

But don't get it twisted, Betty Davis also loved Garbo.

She was once quoted as referring to Garbo's acting instinct as mastery over the machine and pure witchcraft.