Long before expatriate hosers Jim Carrey and William Shatner uttered their immortal lines, “Alrighty then,” and, “Beam me up, Scotty,” Toronto-born actress Mary Pickford started our national entertainment industry tradition of southward migration. Like dozens of Canadian snowbird thespians after her, she burst into global pop consciousness by appearing in Hollywood product.

Although the precociously innocent “Little Mary” and her renowned ringlets had a positively seismic impact on the nascent film industry, her artistic reputation today lies in a state of disrepair. While many silent films by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are easily accessible, a large percentage of Pickford’s work has disappeared into the ether: most of the negatives for her earliest movies disintegrated long ago and her extant work cries out for restorative chemical treatment.

This biography by Eileen Whitfield, a Toronto film and theatre critic, is an ambitious attempt to salvage Pickford’s artistry from the scrap-heap of silent film history – to convince a new generation of film buffs and scholars that our first major cultural export belongs in the front ranks of cinematic legend.

By and large, Whitfield succeeds in this task, combining impeccable research with fresh analysis of Pickford’s surviving on-screen performances.

In exhaustive detail, the career trajectory of the silent era’s biggest star is chronicled: the bleak Victorian upbringing in drab Toronto; the unprecedented box-office power that enabled her to form United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks and Chaplin in 1919; the gradual descent into alcoholism and irrelevance after the advent of “talkies.”

However, what ultimately distinguishes this effort from previous less-accomplished Pickford bios is Whitfield’s incisive reading of early screen acting technique. She deftly guides the reader across the immense cultural divide between contemporary Hollywood and the downright dated, almost alien, world of silent film. In the process, she convincingly argues that instead of subscribing to the stagey artificial acting style of the day, Pickford was an innovator in terms of subtlety and nuance: the first screen performer to establish an intimate bond with the camera.

At times, Whitfield’s prose becomes over-earnest, and one wishes that she would have more fun with her material: surely the ironic fact that “America’s Sweetheart” came close to playing the role of washed-up silent movie star/psycho Norma Desmond in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard demands a less reverential treatment than Whitfield provides. As well, the author quotes far too extensively from Pickford’s tiresome, sanctimonious 1956 autobiography, and fails to treat that source with the proper amount of skepticism.

These quibbles aside, this is an essential work for anyone interested in the birth of Hollywood. Whitfield has taken a huge step toward restoring Mary Pickford’s faded screen image.