Silent Film Stars: The Faces of the 1920s and What Sound Did to Them

In August 1926, crowds so large that police struggled to control them filled the streets of Manhattan outside the funeral home where Rudolph Valentino lay in state. He was 31. Nothing quite like it had happened for an actor before, and it showed how completely a handful of silent film stars had captured the public imagination in barely fifteen years. These were people whose voices most of their fans had never heard. Their fame rested on faces, bodies, and a kind of screen presence that had to work without a single spoken word.

This guide covers the dramatic and romantic stars of the silent era, the films that made them, and what happened to each when the talkies arrived. The great clowns get their own piece, my comparison of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, so here the focus is on the leading ladies, matinee idols and character stars.

How silent film stars were invented

In the earliest years of American film, studios did not publicize performers’ names. Actors were known to audiences by nicknames such as “the Biograph Girl.” The change is usually dated to 1910, when Carl Laemmle’s IMP company lured Florence Lawrence away from Biograph and promoted her by name, an episode often cited as the birth of the star system. Whatever the exact details, the logic was soon obvious to everyone: audiences followed people, not studios, and a famous face could sell a picture before anyone had seen it.

By the end of the 1910s the biggest stars had real power. In 1919 Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin joined director D.W. Griffith to found United Artists, a company built to distribute the films they controlled themselves.

The great dramatic and romantic stars

Mary Pickford

Born in Toronto in 1892, Pickford was the most famous woman in the world for much of the 1910s, billed as “America’s Sweetheart.” She often played spirited young girls well into her twenties and thirties, in films such as The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and Sparrows (1926). She was also one of the shrewdest businesspeople in Hollywood, which is why she sat at the founding table of United Artists.

Douglas Fairbanks

Fairbanks began in light comedies and then reinvented himself as the great swashbuckler of the 1920s with The Mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924). His athletic stunts and huge sets defined the costume adventure for decades. He was also the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Lillian Gish

Gish was D.W. Griffith’s great leading actress, in Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East (1920), whose ice-floe climax is one of the most famous action scenes of the period. Her finest late silent work may be The Wind (1928), directed by Victor Sjöström, in which she plays a young woman worn down by a remorseless prairie landscape. Her career lasted an astonishing length of time, into the late 1980s.

Rudolph Valentino

Valentino became a star almost overnight with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and then The Sheik the same year. He was the screen’s archetypal “Latin lover,” adored by female audiences and often mocked by male critics. The Son of the Sheik (1926) was released shortly before his sudden death that summer.

Greta Garbo

Garbo arrived in Hollywood from Sweden in 1925 and became MGM’s most prestigious star within a couple of years. Flesh and the Devil (1926), opposite John Gilbert, made her a sensation. Her remote, mysterious screen persona was perfectly suited to silent film, which made her studio nervous about the transition to sound.

John Gilbert

Gilbert was the leading male romantic star at MGM in the late 1920s, and The Big Parade (1925), King Vidor’s First World War epic, was one of the biggest hits of the decade. His story is the most famous cautionary tale of the sound transition, and it is discussed below.

Gloria Swanson

Swanson rose through Cecil B. DeMille’s sophisticated marital comedies and became one of the most glamorous stars of the 1920s, later producing her own work, including Sadie Thompson (1928). She is best known today for playing the forgotten silent star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950), a role that commented knowingly on the era she came from.

Clara Bow

Bow was the defining flapper of the late 1920s. It (1927) gave her the nickname “the It girl,” and she also starred in Wings (1927), the aviation drama that won the top award at the first Academy Awards ceremony.

Lon Chaney

Chaney was a different kind of star, famous for transforming himself rather than for glamour, and known as “the Man of a Thousand Faces.” His most celebrated roles were in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), with makeup he designed himself.

Louise Brooks

Brooks made her most lasting films not in Hollywood but in Germany with director G.W. Pabst: Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both 1929. Her sleek bob and natural, modern acting style made her a cult figure decades later, when those films were rediscovered.

Silent stars at a glance

The coming of sound

Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer on 6 October 1927. It was mostly a silent film with synchronized music, but Al Jolson’s songs and a few lines of ad-libbed dialogue electrified audiences. Warners followed with Lights of New York (1928), usually described as the first all-talking feature. By 1929 the major studios were converting at enormous speed, wiring theatres, building soundproof stages and reshaping production around the microphone.

For stars, the change was frightening. Studios ran voice tests. Early microphones were crude, and actors had to stay near hidden mics, which made performances stiff for a while. Stage-trained actors with good diction came west in large numbers, and some established screen performers found their contracts shortened or not renewed.

The John Gilbert question

The popular story says Gilbert’s career collapsed because his voice was high and silly. Historians are skeptical. His first starring talkie, His Glorious Night (1929), drew laughter from audiences, but many writers have argued that the cause was florid romantic dialogue that sounded absurd when spoken aloud and early sound recording, not a defective voice. Studio politics are often cited too, including his reportedly poor relationship with MGM head Louis B. Mayer. The voice legend is, at best, a simplification.

Those who thrived

Plenty of silent stars made the jump comfortably. Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1930), was promoted with the famous tagline “Garbo Talks!” and her low, accented voice became part of her mystique. Janet Gaynor, who won the first Best Actress award for a combination of silent films including Sunrise (1927), remained a top star in the early 1930s. Pickford won an Academy Award for her first talkie, even though she retired from the screen shortly afterwards.

Others were damaged by accent or language. Emil Jannings, who won the first Best Actor award, returned to Germany, where he made The Blue Angel (1930) for Josef von Sternberg.

The whole upheaval was later affectionately satirized in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), with its silent star whose speaking voice threatens to sink a studio’s first musical.

Where to start with these stars

If you want one film per star, try Sparrows for Pickford, The Thief of Bagdad for Fairbanks, The Wind for Gish, Flesh and the Devil for Garbo and Gilbert together, The Phantom of the Opera for Chaney and Pandora’s Box for Brooks. Several of these are well restored and may be found through public-domain archives or licensed services. For broader advice on music, frame rates and choosing restorations, see my guide on silent movies and where to start.

Smaller players are worth seeking out too. The working actors of the mid-1920s, people like Viola Dana and Kenneth Harlan in Universal’s The Ice Flood (1926), show what an ordinary studio star’s career looked like away from the front pages.