1900's:

 

1909 – Mary Pickford appeared for her first screen test for the movie Pippa Passes, with Biograph company director D.W. Griffith.  Even though she didn’t get the part, he was immediately taken with her because of her virtuous face and charming curls.  From that point on, Pickford appeared in fifty-one films – almost one each week!  She was cast in roles such as: scrubwoman, secretary, and woman of any nationality.  Throughout the 1910’s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world.  Her appeal was summed up two years later in the February 1916 issue of Photoplay magazine as “luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity.”  Pickford’s closest female box office rival at this time was thirty-one year old Marguerite Clark.  Marguerite also had a whimsical/girlish charm to which audiences responded.