The Poor Little Rich Girl showed Mary Pickford’s gift for playing a child who sees the adult world clearly, and who refuses to be bought off by wealth.
The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), directed by Maurice Tourneur, stars Pickford as Gwendolyn, a wealthy girl neglected by her busy parents and cared for by servants. When she is sent to the country, she discovers a simpler, kinder world, and the film contrasts that world with the cold luxury of her home.
Pickford plays Gwendolyn with a child’s directness and an adult’s timing. She is not merely cute; she is observant, and her disappointment in her parents is real. The film’s fantasy sequences, in which Gwendolyn imagines a different life, give Pickford room to play both humour and sadness, and they remain the film’s most remembered passages.
It is a signature role because it perfected the Pickford child heroine: a girl who is poor in love even when she is rich in money, and whose moral clarity puts the adults around her to shame.