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 commitment including starving herself for La Bohème, and her 1925 MGM deal in which she turned down a million-dollar salary for profit participation and budget control over films like The Wind. We then cover her fall from fashion in the jazz age, her reinvention on stage as a lewd Ophelia, her Oscar-nominated comeback in Duel in the Sun, The Night of the Hunter, her America First politics, the 2019 Bowling Green State University decision to remove her name over a 1915 Griffith epic, the celebrity petition that followed, and her final film The Whales of August at 94.

• Childhood poverty and the gig-economy hustle that shaped Gish’s work ethic
• How she engineered a new acting style for the close-up camera
• The MGM contract that made her a shadow producer of her own films
• Why the talkies did not end her career but changing tastes nearly did
• The modern controversy over her legacy and the ten-minute Cannes ovation at the end of her career