Mae Marsh could not keep still on screen, and she made that her method. In Griffith's silents she plays fear as fidget and laughs where another actor would weep. She spent her sound years in the corners of John Ford films, easy to miss.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Mae Marsh's hands. In The Birth of a Nation (1915) she plays Flora Cameron, the younger sister, and while the rest of the cast semaphore their feelings from the elbow she twitches, darts, doubles back and cannot settle in a frame. Griffith's actors were taught to make grief legible from the back of a hall. Marsh made it look like something happening to a person. Late in the film, in a scene we will not set up, she is frightened out of her wits and what comes out of her is laughter. She knew what she was doing. In her book Screen Acting she wrote that "It was the hysterical laugh of the little girl in the cellar...that was far more effective than rolling the eyes or weeping would have been."
She got there by hanging around. She followed her sister Marguerite to the Biograph studio, and by 1912 Griffith had put her in Man's Genesis, a lead that grander names had turned down, opposite Robert Harron. They would make something like sixty films together, and he was the right partner for her, a still point she could move around. Intolerance (1916) gave her The Dear One and a courtroom scene she later called the hardest work she ever did, shot four times over. A contract at Goldwyn from 1916 to 1918 produced nothing that used her as well, and after The White Rose (1923), her last starring part of note for Griffith, she stepped back from leads.
She came back in 1931 with Over the Hill and stayed for thirty-odd years, mostly in small parts and often without her name on the picture. John Ford kept finding room for her: Muley's wife in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a face among the women of How Green Was My Valley, Fort Apache, The Quiet Man, The Searchers (1956). These are mothers and neighbours, people who stand in doorways. Ford's crowds ask for stillness, and stillness was never her gift. You can watch a Ford film twice and not know she was in it, which is its own kind of professionalism and also a waste.
Our reaction to The Birth of a Nation is not a comfortable one. We do not recommend the film. Yet Marsh's Flora is the one thing in it that still breathes, and we caught ourselves leaning towards the screen, worried for a girl in a picture built to turn that worry into a lie. That is how good she was, and it is also the trouble: Griffith knew exactly what her nerves would do to an audience, and he aimed them. If you go looking for her, go with the argument in view. The performance survives the film; the film does not deserve it.
Biography
Mae Marsh (born Mary Warne Marsh) was an American film actress whose career spanned over fifty years. She appeared in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) as Flora Cameron and in Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916) as The Dear One.
Marsh began working in films around 1912 with Griffith and Mack Sennett. After her early starring roles, she took a contract with Samuel Goldwyn and later appeared in numerous sound films, often in small or uncredited parts, including The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Quiet Man (1952) and The Searchers (1956). She was married to Louis Lee Arms from 1918 until her death.
