In the many decades after her 1910s and 1920s heyday,”America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, arguably the most famous and powerful actress of the silent film era, professed mixed feelings about the lingering value of her work.

“I never thought my films were important,” Pickford told historian Kevin Brownlow in an interview during the late 1960s for his marvelous oral history of early film, “The Parade’s Gone By.” “I never did anything to save them. I intended to destroy them.”

Sadly, this was a sentiment shared by many and a criticism levied at Pickford from her retirement from movies in 1935 until her death in 1979. It was also patently not true.

“She did more to insure the survival of her films than most silent film performers and most performers now,” explained Christel Schmidt, a Library of Congress film archivist who has spent years cataloging, corralling, and preserving Pickford’s film legacy.”The story persists because it’s such a great story — the artist who wants to destroy her own work.”

Pickford was keenly aware of the value of her unique body of work, which includes appearances in no fewer than 248 films between 1909 and 1935. She spent her retirement establishing and severing relationships with dozens of museums and collections at great personal expense.As a result, her vast film catalog is strewn all over the globe in varying states of preservation and completeness. Over the next two weekends, the Museum of the Moving Image will present “Mary Pickford Restored,” a compilation of four features, assorted short films, and excerpt treasures that Ms. Schmidt has shepherded from film archives around the world.

“America’s Sweetheart” was actually Canadian. Born in Toronto in 1892, Gladys Louise Smith was already a touring stage veteran (as “Baby Gladys”) on both sides of the border when she renamed herself Mary Pickford at the suggestion of Broadway impresario David Belasco just prior to her film debut in 1909. Pickford’s charisma was perfectly suited to the motion picture. Unlike many of her fellow first-generation film actors, she didn’t resort to mugging and flailing extremes in front of the camera.

“I refused to exaggerate in my performances,” she would say decades later, and her truthful, easy screen manner, bolstered by enormous eyes and tiny bow lips, remains as magnetic now as it was almost a century ago.

Under D.W. Griffith’s dictatorial tutelage, Pickford appeared in more than 50 short films for the Biograph Company (located on 14th Street) in her first year alone. Griffith was notoriously stingy with credits for his casts. But from the start, the film-going public couldn’t get enough of “the girl with the golden hair.” When movies swelled to feature length, Pickford’s fame grew with them. And when film production went West in search of more reliable weather and a safe distance from Edison film patent “trust” enforcers, Pickford went West, too. By her fourth feature, 1914’s “Tess of the Storm Country,” she was on her way to becoming a global phenomenon.

In the wake of her phenomenal success, Pickford dictated her own terms to Famous Players (later Paramount) head honcho Adolph Zukor, doubling her salary two years in a row and forming her own production arm within Famous Players, the Pickford Film Corporation, in 1916. As head of the Pickford Film Corporation, Mary (and her mother) oversaw scripts, hired cast and crew, and signed the checks on payday.

Like Charlie Chaplin, Pickford’s fame was tightly tied to a single screen persona. In nearly all of her iconic roles she was invariably, according to Brownlow, “extremely attractive, warm-hearted, generous, funny — but independent and fiery tempered when the occasion demands.” Though her characters were almost always steeped in 19th-century innocence, “her whole career was about straddling the old and the new,” according to Ms. Schmidt. “She had the look of a Victorian angel, but she was very much a new woman of the 20th century.”

In a Griffith melodrama, girls were plucked from freezing waters and delivered from unspeakable perils by their sweethearts. But in Pickford’s self-produced features, “her characters saved themselves,” Ms. Schmidt said. “They never have to get rescued from an ice-flow.”

In the Pickford-produced, World War I propaganda piece, “The Little American,” (tomorrow and Sunday at 4 p.m.), “our Mary” gets chased around a dark room by a lust-crazed German soldier just like the Gish sisters did in Griffith’s “Hearts of the World.” But unlike the frail heroines of Griffith’s film, Pickford’s character flips on the lights to discover that, unbeknownst to either of them, her would-be ravisher is the half-German fianceé who left her to heed the Kaiser’s call to arms earlier in the picture. Co-written by Jeanie McPherson, the script for “The Little American” is seasoned with humanizing touches (such as the fiancée’s lingering embarrassment) that neutralize director Cecil B. DeMille’s characteristic lack of subtlety.

In 1919 Pickford, her soon-to-be second husband Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Griffith formed their own production company, United Artists. Each of the original UA partners pledged to contribute five films a year for distribution by UA through a combination of independent theaters. None of them ever made quota, but Pickford’s 1926 UA contribution “Sparrows” (playing 9/2 & 9/3) remains one of her best and most unusual films.

Heavily influenced by the Expressionistic lighting and sets of Germany’s UFA studios, “Sparrows” is a feast of moody swamps, sinister baby-snatching villains, and jaw-dropping religious imagery (in one scene, an actor portraying Christ takes possession of a dead orphan’s soul) that was an acknowledged influence on Charles Laughton’s future stylistic throwback, “The Night of the Hunter.”

Despite winning the first Best Actress Oscar for a sound performance (for Coquette in 1929), Pickford only made two talkies before calling it a career in 1935. The adult roles she created for herself had won mixed approval at best from her legion of fans. For Pickford, the fate of one of her UA partners was the writing on the wall.

“I left the screen because I didn’t want what happened to Chaplin to happen to me,” she told Brownlow. “When he discarded the Little Tramp, the Little Tramp turned around and killed him. The little girl made me. I wasn’t waiting for the little girl to kill me.”

Instead, Pickford and her third and final husband, Buddy Rogers, lived off her immense fortune (she was the last of the original United Artists to sell out in the 1950s) until old age and alcoholism claimed her 27 years ago.

“Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter,” was the formula Pickford told Kevin Brownlow had guided her career. It might seem like a sawdust and tinsel cliché now, but the restored films of Mary Pickford suggest that it remains an accurate layman’s introduction to the storytelling physics that she mastered.

From August 26 to September 3 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, 718-784-4520).