In 1925, Lillian Gish sat in a federal courtroom during a scandalous lawsuit brought by her former producer and calmly ate a raw carrot, sparking a nationwide health craze. Five years earlier she had been lying unconscious on an ice floe drifting toward a waterfall for Way Down East, a shoot that left her with permanent nerve damage. This episode traces how a girl born into poverty in Ohio in 1893, with an alcoholic father who abandoned the family and later died in an institution, worked the child actor circuit with her sister Dorothy, ran candy and popcorn stands with her mother, and entered film in 1912 through her friend Gladys Smith, better known as Mary Pickford, and director D.W. Griffith.

We explore how Gish rejected stage-style gestures and developed the internal, micro-expression acting the camera demanded, her extreme physical com ...