Mary Pickford Trivia
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67 free Mary Pickford trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Mary Pickford was the most famous woman in the world for most of the 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood's first millionaire and the most powerful woman ever to work there, and this Mary Pickford trivia quiz covers all of it. The early questions follow Gladys Smith from a Toronto boarding house to Broadway and David Belasco, the 1909 screen test with D. W. Griffith, $10 a day at Biograph and the exhibitors' sandwich boards that called her the Girl with the Golden Curls. Then come the business questions: the $10,000-a-week contract with Zukor, the refusal of block-booking, the founding of United Artists with Chaplin, Fairbanks and Griffith, the films from Tess of the Storm Country and Stella Maris to Pollyanna, Sparrows and Coquette, the bob that made the front page, and the Oscar for her first talkie. The personal side takes in Owen Moore, the marriage of the century to Douglas Fairbanks, Pickfair and its swimming pool, Buddy Rogers, the Liberty Bond drives, the Motion Picture Relief Fund and the reclusive final decades. Difficulty runs from easy to expert. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on Pickford, her films and the people around her, and each question links to its source. Try our Silent Film and Charlie Chaplin quizzes next.
30 of 67 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What nickname, tied to the ingenue persona she defined on screen, is Mary Pickford best known by?
America's Sweetheart
America's Sweetheart was also called the Queen of the Movies; she is credited with having defined the ingénue type in cinema.
Q 02In which city was Mary Pickford born in 1892?
Toronto
Mary Pickford was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 8 April 1892; her University Avenue birthplace later became part of the Hospital for Sick Children site.
Q 03What was Mary Pickford's birth name?
Gladys Louise Smith
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto on 8 April 1892; her younger siblings Lottie and Jack Smith also acted under the Pickford name.
Q 04Her early stage career ended with the starring role of Little Eva in a production of which play?
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Little Eva is the saintly child in Uncle Tom's Cabin; Pickford starred in the role with a Toronto stock company after debuting aged seven in The Silver King.
Q 05Which Broadway producer gave her the stage name Mary Pickford when he cast her in The Warrens of Virginia in 1907?
David Belasco
David Belasco cast her in The Warrens of Virginia in 1907 and renamed her Mary Pickford, keeping her middle name and taking the surname from her family.
Q 06On 19 April 1909 D. W. Griffith screen-tested her for which film, whose role went to someone else?
Pippa Passes
Pickford screen-tested for Pippa Passes (1909), adapted from Robert Browning's poem; the role went to another actress, but Griffith hired her and had her filming the next day.
Q 07Which studio did she join under Griffith in 1909, appearing in 51 of its films that year?
Biograph
Biograph, where D. W. Griffith directed, put her in 51 films in 1909; it did not credit actors, so exhibitors advertised her simply as the Girl with the Golden Curls.
Q 08Griffith agreed to pay the newcomer how much a day, double the studio's usual rate?
$10
Pickford held out for $10 a day, twice Biograph's standard $5, and Griffith also guaranteed her $40 a week.
Q 09Which sisters did she introduce to Griffith in 1912, launching two major silent careers?
Lillian and Dorothy Gish
Pickford introduced Lillian and Dorothy Gish to Griffith at Biograph in 1912; the Gish and Smith families had met years earlier while touring in small stage companies.
Q 10Her last short for Griffith, The New York Hat (1912), was written by which future author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?
Anita Loos
Anita Loos, later the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), wrote The New York Hat; Lionel Barrymore and Lillian Gish were also in the cast.
Q 11Adolph Zukor's Famous Players, which she joined full-time in 1913, evolved into which studio?
Paramount Pictures
Famous Players merged with Jesse L. Lasky's company in 1916 and eventually took the Paramount Pictures name; Zukor's first film with her, A Good Little Devil, was shelved for eleven months.
Q 12Which 1914 film was the first to put her name above the title on cinema marquees?
Hearts Adrift
Hearts Adrift (1914), in which she played a castaway, was so popular that her name went above the title and Zukor granted the first of her well-publicised pay raises.
Q 13Which 1914 hit, said to have sent her career into orbit, did she remake in 1922?
Tess of the Storm Country
Q 21In Stella Maris (1918) she played two roles: the title character and what?
An orphan servant
Her second role was Unity Blake, a plain, abused orphan servant, a startling contrast to the beautiful title character and to Pickford's usual image.
Q 22In Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921) she played the boy Cedric and which other character?
His mother
Pickford played both Cedric and his mother, known as Dearest, using double-exposure trick photography; her brother Jack Pickford co-directed with Alfred E. Green.
Q 23Which German director did she bring to Hollywood in 1922 to direct her in Rosita?
Ernst Lubitsch
Tess of the Storm Country (1914) made her, in historian Kevin Brownlow's words, the most popular actress in America; she remade it in 1922.
Q 14Her June 1916 contract with Zukor gave her full production control and a record salary of how much a week?
$10,000
The June 1916 deal paid $10,000 a week plus half her films' profits, guaranteed at $1.04 million, making her the first actress with a million-dollar contract.
Q 15Which distribution practice did Pickford refuse to let Zukor apply to her films in 1916?
Block-booking
Pickford refused block-booking, the bundling of weak films with strong ones, so her films went out singly through a special Famous Players unit called Artcraft.
Q 16When her contract expired in 1918, Zukor offered her how much simply to leave the movie business?
$250,000
Zukor offered $250,000 for her to quit films in 1918; she declined and signed with First National Pictures on her own terms instead.
Q 17Which company did Mary Pickford co-found in 1919 with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith?
United Artists
United Artists (1919) was purely a distributor, unlike the studios, so its founders Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks and Griffith kept control of their own productions.
Q 18Which 1920 film was her first release through United Artists?
Pollyanna
Pollyanna (1920), from Eleanor H. Porter's novel about a relentlessly cheerful orphan, was her first United Artists release and grossed around $1.1 million.
Q 19Pickford was one of how many founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?
36
Pickford was one of the 36 founders of the Academy in 1927; the Academy later named its Vine Street film archive the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study.
Q 20Which screenwriter, her close friend, adapted The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and became the first writer to win two Oscars?
Frances Marion
Frances Marion adapted The Poor Little Rich Girl and later won writing Oscars for The Big House and The Champ; her friendship with Pickford is the subject of Melanie Benjamin's 2018 novel The Girls in the Picture.
Ernst Lubitsch, brought from Germany in 1922, directed Rosita (1923), a success Pickford nonetheless came to dislike; he stayed in Hollywood and later made Trouble in Paradise and Ninotchka.
Q 24In Sparrows (1926) she leads orphans out of a 'baby farm' beside a swamp infested with what?
Alligators
The swamp in Sparrows is full of alligators; Pickford later claimed director William Beaudine made her carry a real baby across the water above them.
Q 25Pickford famously said that adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on what?
The Venus de Milo
Pickford said adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo; she underestimated talkies and her career faded within a few years of their arrival.
Q 26What did Pickford do in 1928 that made the front page of The New York Times?
Cut her curls into a bob
In June 1928 Pickford cut her famous ringlets into a bob; the curls had become a symbol of female virtue, and shocked fans read about it on the front page of The New York Times.
Q 27For which 1929 film, her first talkie, did she win the Academy Award for Best Actress?
Coquette
Coquette (1929), her first talkie, won Pickford the Best Actress Oscar as a reckless Southern flirt; the award was widely seen as a tribute to her stature rather than the performance.
Q 28Her Best Actress Oscar was which in the award's history?
The second
Pickford's was the second Best Actress Oscar ever given; Janet Gaynor had won the inaugural award at the first ceremony in May 1929.
Q 29Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks co-starred in a 1929 version of which Shakespeare play, the first sound adaptation of it?
The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew (1929) paired Pickford and Fairbanks in the first Shakespeare talkie; the legendary credit 'additional dialogue by Sam Taylor' appears never to have existed.
Q 30In 1933 she made a Technicolor screen test for which Disney live-action/animated project, later scrapped?
Alice in Wonderland
Pickford tested for Walt Disney's planned live-action/animated Alice in Wonderland; the project was dropped after Paramount released its own all-star Alice in 1933, and only one Technicolor still survives.