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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
Owen Moore and Mary PickfordScreen Lovers - part 2 of 2The couple had first met when Moore had wandered late one evening into the plain brownstone building on New York’s East 14th Street which housed the fledgling moving picture enterprise, The Biograph Company. A leading actor with the company for the past two years, Moore treated the studio as a second home, often sleeping overnight in one of the dressing rooms after a night on the town. Moore heard voices raised in loud and heated conversation. One of the voices he recognised as that of director David Wark Griffith, an imposing Southerner of Irish extraction and the creative dynamo of the picture company. The other voice belonged to a girl he did not know. Peeking into the building’s ballroom, which served as the main stage, he was spotted by Griffith, who ordered Moore to join them. Moore sauntered over, casually inspecting the young girl with Griffith. She was a newcomer and Griffith had been auditioning her for a love scene that would be central to a one-reel melodrama soon to go into production. In the absence of an actor Griffith had ordered the would-be film actress who called herself Mary Pickford to embrace a pillar. She had been objecting strenuously to making love to this “cold pillar” when Moore made his entrance. He was delighted to take the pillar’s role and the newcomer didn’t object either. “I shall never forget that moment when Owen Moore put his arms around me. My heart was pounding so fast from embarrassment that I was sure he could hear it,” she would remember in her memoirs, Sunshine and Shadow. Pickford describes Moore as “five feet eleven inches tall, extremely handsome, with a ruddy Irish complexion, perfect teeth, dark blue eyes, and a very musical voice. Moreover he was the Beau Brummel of Biograph, always dressed with immaculate elegance. Like the other actors and actresses in the company there, he was using Biograph for what it was worth until he could find a way to get back into legitimate theatre.” Pickford, who was just seventeen at the time, got the part and a permanent job at Biograph. Within a few days she and Moore, seven years her senior, would be playing lovers in their first film together, The Violin Maker of Cremona. They were to be lovers on and off the screen for years to come.
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