Mary Miles Minter

“Anne of Green Gables” was published  in 1908 and further adventures of the girl with red hair were published soon after. In Nov. 1919 the first “Anne of Green Gables” movie was released and it made to the Rialto Theatre in East Rochester a few months later. Like many other silent movies from that time no copy of the movie still exists. There are some promotion photos. The listing for the movie on IMDB says that the movie “deviated so much from L.M. Montgomery’s book that the author herself was purportedly outraged.” The newspaper article says that the story takes place in New England but it really takes place in Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Mary Miles Minter was only 17 when the movie was released. She had been on stage as a child. She ended up making 52 movies between 1915 and 1923 when her movie career ended at aged 22. Mary died in 1984.

The tale of Anne Shirley has been re-told many times on stage, movies, TV and a cartoon series.

The Fairport Herald

Wednesday, Feb. 4, 1920

“Anne of Green Gables”

Scenes for the graduation exercises of Anne Shirley in “Anne of Green Gables,” Mary Miles Minters’s first picture for the Realart Pictures Corporation, were made at the Webb Academy of Marine Engineering and Naval Architecture, a well known boys’ school in New York. When the Minter company arrived at the Academy a football game was in progress, but the lure of the camera was so strong that the students and team forgot the excitement over the pig-skin and worked in the picture. This picture, which has many novelties evolved from the material in L. M. Montgomery’s four famous “Anne” books, will be shown at the Rialto Theatre at East Rochester next week. It gives a faithful presentation of incidents from the day that Anne arrived at the Cuthbert’s New England home until the days when she taught school — and found the man of her dreams.