IV

SARA ALLGOOD, JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK AND HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY

Sara Allgood as Maurya in Riders to the Sea, September 1938;

Sara Allgood as herself, September 1938. (Photograph Carl Van Vechten; Beinicke Library, Yale University)

 

 

Aportrait of Sara Allgood (1879–1950), one of the greatest early Irish actresses, hangs among those of the founders in the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland. Biographical entries in encyclopedias mention that she was with the Abbey when it opened in 1904, that her sister Molly (stage name ‘Maire O’Neill’) had been betrothed to J.M. Synge at the time of his death, and that ‘Sally’ Allgood hit her peak as Juno in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), before going to Hollywood where, having been employed, it is falsely said, in sadly insignificant film roles, she died in poverty on 13 September 1950.

Two clichés meet here: the sad emigrant from the emerald isle and the decline of a national dramatic actress forced into the service of the American entertainment industry. Lost in such a brief biography is not just the detail but the whole shape of Allgood’s life. Of her sixty-seven years, fifty-four of them on the stage, she was with the Abbey for only twelve. By 1908, just four years after the Abbey opened, she was breaking away for spells with the Manchester Gaiety and Mrs Patrick Campbell’s company in London. The year 1914 found Allgood with Liverpool Repertory starring in John Masefield’s Nan.1 The end of that run brought her back to the Abbey for the first six months of 1915.

Soon she was off again, having obtained the lead – for once a pretty ingénue role was hers – in a Hibernicized melodrama, Peg O’ My Heart, scheduled to tour Australia. The next five years ‘down under’ are a dark, undocumented period of Allgood’s life. Major events in a woman’s whole life occurred – marriage, the birth of two children, the deaths of husband and both children – of which she almost never spoke upon her return in May 1920.

On her return to Britain, even before her ship had docked, Allgood had arranged work through J.B. Fagan in a touring British production of Lennox Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy among a cast of ex-Abbey players, including her sister Molly and Molly’s second husband, Arthur Sinclair.2 This company of veterans was successful on stage but quarrelsome off it. Sara Allgood, Sinclair later complained, always wanted ‘to play flappers, though her waistline had long since vanished’.3 She came to hate Molly’s husband, and queered his pitch by giving him the wrong cues or walking off stage while he still had lines to say to her. ‘She thinks she is everybody,’ complained Sinclair, who had a right to believe he was somebody too.

In late 1923 Allgood left the London Irish Players for Dublin. It was her good luck to return to the Abbey not long before rehearsals began on Sean O’Casey’s new play and first classic, Juno and the Paycock. There was no waiting for recognition of her greatness in the lead role; the play was instantly acclaimed upon its debut on 3 March 1924. The following year, Allgood left to join a London production of Juno and the Paycock with a different cast, one that included Sinclair and Molly Allgood.4

2

November 1937, many years, many theatres, and many films later (including three directed by Alfred Hitchcock), Allgood was in Edinburgh touring in a musical comedy with Douglas Byng (1893–1987), customarily billed as ‘bawdy but British’.5 It was the only berth she could find after the flop in New York of a madcap comedy based on the British love of dogs and fair play, Storm in a Teacup.6 Then arrived a stroke of actor’s good fortune: an offer by telegram from Eddie Dowling (1894–1976), one of the Shubert brothers’ producers.7 In 1937 he calculated on the possibility of a Broadway success with a play that had originally opened on 25 January 1937 at the Abbey, Paul Vincent Carroll’s Shadow and Substance.

In Dublin the production had featured Arthur Shields and sixteen-year-old Phyllis Ryan.8 Rather daringly for its time, Shadow and Substance put a cast of clergymen on stage. An ugly and hysterical society is represented, not wholly unlike the one in Arthur Miller’s Salem witchcraft play, The Crucible (1953). For the lead in a Broadway production – religion on stage, à la Eugene O’Neill, was cutting edge in the USA too – Dowling had secured the knighted British character actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Now Dowling aimed to add Sara Allgood to the cast. The failure of the stage version of Storm in a Teacup did not, in his judgment, diminish her drawing power. A film of the play with Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison in the leads and Allgood in her part as a plucky dog-lover had done good business from February 1937.

Obviously, in the casting of Shadow and Substance, Allgood could not play the female lead, Brigid, the young, pious and pretty housekeeper. She was no longer young and had never been pretty. It would be her job as ‘Jemima Cooper’ to illustrate the theme that village society was hysterical and ugly, and, more importantly, by her high billing to advertise a degree of Irish authenticity.

Those who had this authenticity in the fullest measure, the Abbey players, happened to be in New York at the time.9 At the beginning of October they had arrived under the leadership of F.R. Higgins, commercial publisher (The Builders’ Provider, Irish Oil and Colour Trade Review, and others), poet, and mate of W.B. Yeats.10 Through his own pushiness and Yeats’s support, Higgins had become the company’s latest artistic director, determined to put it on a business footing and bring to an end decades of unprofitability.

But the New World was all new to him. This was his first trip to Manhattan, and Higgins was astonished by skyscrapers – ‘You could not see up to them’ – and the rooms in the Edison Hotel with their own baths, towels in the bathrooms, and soap in little paper packets. It was amazing. The Edison, he wrote his wife, was ten times bigger than the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin’s finest, and ten times swankier too. But out on the streets, which he conceded were very clean, every second person was black, and Sam, Jacob, and Lee Shubert – promoters of the Abbey tour – were, Higgins concluded, Jewish.11

In early November Eddie Dowling approached Higgins about a production of Shadow and Substance on Broadway under Abbey auspices, so long as the star be Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Higgins did not trust Dowling: in his eyes, the producer was ‘an Italian Jew posing as an Irishman’ (what advantage such a pose would secure it is hard to say).12 Higgins refused the offer point-blank. The Abbey’s players would not serve in 1930s’ America as supernumeraries in a show with a Jewish manager and an English star. Then how about, Dowling suggested, releasing Arthur Shields to direct five weeks of rehearsals for Dowling’s production? Higgins accepted the alternative, but, asserting himself as an experienced businessman not to be fooled, stipulated two conditions: 50 per cent of Shields’s $400 a week salary be paid to the Abbey Theatre; a two-week run of The Playboy be guaranteed in one of Lee Shubert’s New York theatres.13

Shadow and Substance opened on 26 January 1938 with Hardwicke playing opposite Julie Haydon and with Allgood in support, and then ran and ran and ran, 274 performances in all. It won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle prize for best foreign play of the 1937/38 season. For Sara Allgood, it was all day off in Manhattan, with just a few lines each night, her name in lights on the marquee, and steady money, month in and month out.

3

In September 1938, while the run of Shadow and Substance continued, Sara Allgood was contacted by Carl Van Vechten.14 Having met Allgood after a 21 March 1938 performance of Shadow and Substance, he wanted to make a portrait of her, and Allgood consented to sit for him on 13 September 1938.15 Two plates from this shoot are stunning. One photograph shows the actress, the other the woman. In the first, Allgood is posed in a shawl, part of her costume for a revival of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1903), in which she played Maurya of Inishmaan, who has lost the last of her six sons, all to the sea. Hands half-folded as if in prayer or grief, the head slightly inclined and eyes cast down to the side, Allgood falls into the pose of so many Marys in paintings of the death of Jesus. Yet this pietà attitude can also be understood as expressive of something both local (a peasant woman in an Irish fishing community) and infinite, in the idea that those who give life cannot prevent the death of the life they have given: ‘No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied.’16

The other photograph could hardly be more different. Wearing at a jaunty angle a netted hat of a sort then fashionable, Sara Allgood flashes a face lit up with laughter, and a fine set of teeth. Two strings of pearls dip into her open-necked dress. This is not Maurya, but the successful Broadway actress who never appears as herself on stage. There is a great gap between the immemorial and illiterate yet profound emotion of Maurya and the spontaneous and self-pleased high spirits of Sara. What was the woman in the hat like when unprompted by a part? What was it that she brought to her roles?

William Hazlitt, the English essayist, notices what is fundamental to actors’ lives. During their time, they may be the most admired people of any profession, yet the public, while fond of particular actors and even familiar with them, do not know who these individuals really are, because when they are heard on stage, as Hazlitt puts it, ‘Their very thoughts are not their own.’ They pass from joy to woe at ‘the prompter’s call’.17 We simply see them say the words of another and pretend to think.

According to old-timers among theatre-goers, the actors of the past are always the best; they had a greatness never to be seen again. This opinion is both unprovable and incontestable because, as Hazlitt says, the genius of the actor dies with him or her. This fact is frustrating for those interested in Irish theatre of the early twentieth century, when the works of Synge, O’Casey and Shaw were first staged, and when, according to tradition, a glorious and native style of acting prevailed at the Abbey, embodied in famous members of the company like the Fay brothers, the Allgood sisters, Arthur Sinclair and J.M. Kerrigan in the first decade, and Barry Fitzgerald, F.J. McCormick and others during the third decade. There are not even silent films of an Abbey production made during its glory days. The closest one can come is John Ford’s 1936 film The Plough and the Stars, which, albeit interesting, is unsatisfactory.

However, it is not strictly true that these actors left no record behind of their genius. There are contemporary reviews of their performances, though rarely are these minutely descriptive or even evocative. The laudatory epithets of one era are as useless as those of another, just puffs of mist. Photographs survive of Abbey actors in costume for a variety of plays, many of them publicity stills that capture identifiable dramatic moments of a play. From these, just as from Carl Van Vechten’s studio shot of Allgood as Maurya, one can get a feel for the actor’s physical attitudes, gestures and ‘face work’. Many of the best of the actors from the early Abbey went into films by the 1930s, usually first in London, then in Hollywood. On the soundtracks of the films that circulate on DVD or videotape, we can hear the voices of Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields and others, the absence of which makes the publicity stills finally so dissatisfyingly mute a record. And those voices are truly characterful. One can speculate upon what vestiges of an Abbey style of voice, movement and characterization is traceable in such films. Yet these recovered moments of lost time do not tell us much of the person who creates the performance, of the woman in the hat, as opposed to the bereaved mother in an Aran shawl.

4

How important the intelligent individualities of great actors are to the performances they render is an open question. It is one that received several implied answers on 28 September 1932 by the dignitaries gathered together in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre for the unveiling of a portrait of Sara Allgood by Sarah Purser. The Minister of Finance of the Irish Free State, Seán MacEntee, sent a letter (read by Lennox Robinson on the occasion) that acclaimed Allgood’s work as an inspiration to the founders of the new state. MacEntee’s compliment was not so ‘over the top’ as it might seem. Another government minister who had been active in the War of Independence, C.S. (‘Todd’) Andrews, before that war spent his Saturday nights with Sinn Féin friends in the Abbey Theatre. Nursed on its pageantry, their Ireland became (these are the words of C.S. Andrews): ‘an Ireland which had nothing to do with economics, property, or with how people lived or loved or prayed. It had in fact become a political abstraction, and from Caitlin Ni Uallachain [Cathleen ni Houlihan], Roisín Dubh and the Sean Bhean Bhocht proceeded the Republic.’18 Sara Allgood impersonated Cathleen ni Houlihan in the famously incendiary play of that title, and she was Sean Bhean Bhocht in Lady Gregory’s patriotically maudlin The Old Woman Remembers.19 So Allgood served as the very image of Mother Ireland for many young men, future soldiers, ‘martyrs’ and ministers of state. At the unveiling of the portrait of Sara Allgood, W.B. Yeats was eloquent on her power. Allgood, he said, ‘made whole masses of emotion possible which otherwise would have lain latent in the mind of the author. Like other great actresses, and great artists of every kind, she possessed the power to “mould history”.’20 In ceremonies such as this, poets and ministers of state do not speak on oath, and understatement is not the accepted manner of speaking. Nonetheless, Yeats was articulating a long-held belief that great actors could inspire authors to write great plays, and then these same actors would invest the scripted characters with emotion and life.

Yeats himself had tried to write plays for Florence Darragh and Mrs Patrick Campbell to act in: Deirdre (1906) and The Player Queen (1922). No woman in the Abbey ensemble, Yeats felt, could display the bewitching sexuality of these heroines on stage. When he thought of ‘the movements’ of Miss Darragh as Salomé in the play by Oscar Wilde, he ‘ventured and discovered subtleties of emotion’ for his Deirdre that he had never before attempted.21 He accepted as facts that Sara Allgood was necessary in similar fashion to Lady Gregory’s early ‘peasant’ work and that Molly Allgood had aroused emotions in Synge that found romantic expression in The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), emotions which Molly Allgood then embodied on stage.

Yeats’s concept of actors as actualizers of emotional potentialities in the mind of a writer, on occasion prior to the act of composition, and initiatory of it, is a startling extension of the Stanislavskian formulation. The Russian director urged actors to draw upon their own past emotions and to find conscious means for reaching unconscious memories. The actor’s job was, according to Stanislavski, to actualize emotional potentialities in characters once they had been created, and, quite apart from the authors who created them, to draw not upon the playwright’s advice or upon textual study but upon masses of their own personal psychic material.

In addition to the actress-as-Muse model, Yeats entertained another concept of the relation of actors to the parts they play. Perhaps, he thought, they were like spirit mediums, people dispossessed of their own bodies by spirits now seeking self-expression. In Words upon the Windowpane (1934), his character ‘Mrs Henderson’ falls into a trance and speaks with the voice of several ghosts, both men and women, until, shaken by the rage of the spirit of Jonathan Swift, she awakes in ignorance of the characters that she has somehow channelled.

At the 1932 unveiling, Allgood returned Yeats’s compliment. Writers, she said, ‘had helped her to express something inside her of which she had not been aware at all’.22 So does the actress, as if under hypnosis, ‘act out’ something repressed, and only later – if at all – become conscious of it? Perhaps, Allgood implies, the power of the acting is in proportion both to the depth at which an emotion has been buried and to the capacity of great writing to plumb those depths.

By the end of the ceremonial exchange of compliments of Yeats and Allgood, how things stood in the relations between playwright, actor and role was fraught with conflicting possibilities, a sort of uncertainty always prolific for Yeats. A year earlier, in a preface to Words upon the Windowpane, he had written of the relations between spirits and mediums, and characters and actors. His key sentence begins ‘I consider it certain,’ and many words later that sentence concludes that the voice that speaks at a séance ‘is first of all a secondary personality or dramatization created by, in, or through a medium.’23 Alas, whether it is by, in or through is just what one wanted to ascertain. Is shawled Maurya a secondary personality artistically created by Sara Allgood, the woman in the netted hat? Is Maurya created in Allgood by Synge, who had seen in her both stoicism and the potential to release unexpressed grief?24 Or is Maurya the effect of the playscript seen and heard by us through Allgood, who is a passive medium of a certain quality, like a pane of glass or a phonograph?

The question is important. Whether it is worthwhile to investigate the biography of actors depends on the answer. William Hazlitt was of the opinion that what the public sees of actors on stage is a ‘likeness of the world’, but a ‘bettered likeness … with the dull part left out’. The dull part, he suggested, is the actor’s own life, who ‘when [she is] alone is nothing’.25

5

The early life of the Allgoods is hardly predictable. Sara was born on 31 October 1879, the first of eight children, in an old-fashioned tenant house at 45 Middle Abbey Street, just a few hundred yards west of the theatre where she would make her name.26 Her first ancestor in Ireland was an English commissioned officer, Edward Allgood, who formed a battalion in Ireland in 1786. Edward Allgood’s son Henry married a Catholic (named O’Neill) and raised his son George to be a Protestant, and a Protestant he became to the extent of joining the Orange Order, a sectarian political society dedicated to sustaining the memory of King William III and Protestant domination of Ireland. However, George Allgood also married a Catholic, Margaret Harold. Like his father, he then tried to raise his children as Protestants. This was difficult to do, living where he did, utterly surrounded in Dublin’s northside by Catholics.

George Allgood insisted on proper deportment in his brood: the children had to rise when he entered the room, and remain silent unless spoken to. He himself never visited the rooms of other tenants, and wished his children not to do so, in vain. While he could not afford to send them to a fee-paying Protestant school, he had them registered as Protestant at the Marlborough Street National School (almost all the other students were Catholic).

In defiance of her husband, but with the assistance of the clergy at Presentation Convent on George’s Hill, just four blocks west of the Allgood’s dwelling, his wife Margaret took the children each in turn for secret instruction and ultimately confirmation as Roman Catholics.

While his children were taking forbidden instruction in the one true faith, George Allgood was working long weeks as a proofreader in the Queen’s Printing Office, Abbey Street. Reading, he believed, was the best path in life for his children. He would bring home proofs of poems – Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ was one, and William Allingham’s ‘The Fairies’ another. To please him in the evenings after work, his daughter Sara recited them, and he exclaimed at her brilliance. In 1896 George Allgood fell ill. From his deathbed he said again and again to his wife of the children from whom he was about to part, ‘Educate them, educate them.’ 

There were a lot of them to educate. When George Allgood passed away on 2 August 1896, 38-year-old Mrs Allgood had a babe in arms of five months and seven other children, Sara being the oldest. Although she had begun acting lessons with Frank Fay the year before (voice production, deportment, breathing exercises, poetry recitation), Allgood had to go to work upon the death of her father to help support the family. She got a job not far from the family’s residence at the time, Ormond Quay, at P.J. Walsh’s antique shop in Bachelor’s Walk, where she learned about Chippendale furniture, Morrisdesigned cretonne, and Aubusson carpets, in order to assist the ‘Quality’ who shopped there.

It is remarkable that of the great Abbey actors, the Shields brothers and the Allgood sisters came from inner-city Dublin Protestant fathers who were artisans in the printing trades. Audiences generally credited these actors with authenticity in their representations of Synge and Gregory’s Catholic peasants from the West of Ireland or O’Casey’s Catholic Dubliners. Yet they were not so much examples of typical Irish people as they were students of the art of mimicry of Irish characteristics, who lived at close quarters with those they studied.

Sara’s sister Molly was the famous beloved, a beautiful tease who inspired even the somewhat morose J.M. Synge with a rage of love, and later wed G.H. Mair (1886–1926), an Oxford scholar and writer for The Manchester Guardian, and finally (but not permanently) married the great actor Arthur Sinclair.27

Yet Sara Allgood also attracted romantic attention in her early years at the Abbey. Frank Fay gave her editions of Synge’s plays and Yeats’s poems, then a ten-guinea bicycle (which her brother pawned). Still, she was surprised to receive, when on an Abbey tour of England in March 1904, Frank Fay’s written proposal of marriage. She claimed to have been ‘quite unconscious’ of his intention up until that moment. Around 1908 J.M. Kerrigan, an Abbey actor, also presented her with a wristwatch and a proposal of marriage. She kept the wristwatch but refused the proposal. Kerrigan later asked for the watch back, and then stamped it to bits on the floor of the Abbey green room. Next Arthur Sinclair, in tight trousers and with golden hair parted in the middle like Oscar Wilde’s, gave her another wristwatch (one suspects that the actress was often late for appointments). Allgood showed off her latest prize to Lady Gregory.

‘Am I to congratulate you?’ Gregory inquired.

‘What? Does a wristwatch mean a proposal of marriage?’

Her hand having been forced by Lady Gregory, Allgood had to give the watch back to Sinclair (rather than wear it or pawn it).

Sean O’Casey’s diagnosis many years later was that Sara Allgood was ‘an odd mixture; one minute primed with prudery, the next one leppin’ with sex’.28

6

One can guess at certain configurations in Sara Allgood’s psyche from such anecdotes of her early life: Daddy’s girl and child star; a child of mixed marriage who had to play two parts, one Protestant, the other Catholic; tenement girl who was taught stage deportment and the best shop-assistant manners; a professional actress to whom the profession was alone what had lifted her out of poverty and into sporadic, flush paydays; daughter of a mother of eight who may have come to equate reproduction with destitution. Yet the real secret of her later life seems to lie in Australia.

And Allgood meant those subcontinental years to remain largely secret. In the 1940s, when she set down her ‘Memories’, she recalls some facts. The London members of the cast of Peg o’ My Heart embarked for Australia in January 1916. In 1917 she married Gerald Henson, an Australian actor who played ‘Sir Gerald’ in the play.29 They bought ‘Alton’, a small cottage on Misman Bay, Sydney. In 1918 Mr and Mrs Henson were in New Zealand touring a production when the influenza epidemic forced the closing of theatres. By the time they reached a hotel in Wellington, New Zealand, people were ‘dying like flies’, Gerald Henson felt weak and Sara had a cough. A doctor could not be obtained for five days. Gerald Henson died a week later. En route to Sydney, Sara Allgood was quarantined for a week on a leper island. (This is where, it may be, her son John was born and died.) Because of the epidemic, the theatres in Australia remained closed until June, when she was happy to get back on stage in Out There by Hartley Manners, author of Peg o’ My Heart. When she left Sydney on 17 March 1920, she took along her pet parrot and a dog named ‘Yen’. They both died en route.

As her niece Mrs Hague noted on the manuscript of the memoir, it is strange that Allgood makes no mention of a baby: ‘I am quite certain Sally had two children, Mary first, then John, both of whom she lost. She told me so herself. However, she never spoke of her children and rarely of her husband.’ There is an obituary in the Times of a daughter, unnamed, born prematurely on 17 January 1918, who ‘survived a short time only’.30 Of the second baby, whom Mrs Hague calls ‘John’, no record has been traced.

It is also noteworthy that Allgood makes no mention of the fact that her husband, like her father and grandfather, was a Protestant, and that Allgood agreed to marry him in a Methodist Church. In Daughters of Erin, Elizabeth Coxhead speculates that Sara Allgood saw the deaths of her children and husband as ‘a judgment upon her for having married a Protestant, and religious observance became expiation as well as relief’.31 However, greater relief than confession and the Mass may have been the regular thunder of applause from pit, boxes and gallery, the whole house in a roar, for it was that she sought from city to city, year by year.

7

In January 1940 Arthur Shields called upon Sara Allgood for help in an emergency. As explained in Chapter III, Shields, with young producer Eddie Choate, had taken the Maxine Elliott Theatre for a production of Paul Vincent Carroll’s Kindred, and it had been an immediate failure. He, now with Aideen O’Connor on his hands, was facing bankruptcy with no way back to Dublin in wartime. His plan was to recoup the Kindred losses by means of a revival of Juno and the Paycock featuring its original Abbey stars, Barry Fitzgerald and Sara Allgood. She was promised 10 per cent of the profits if she would take the part on short notice and perform with little rehearsal.32

Things were not peaceful backstage. Sara Allgood was always a prima donna. When she was not getting all the attention on stage by her acting, she contrived to get it offstage by making trouble. Yet Juno got off to a decent start: good audiences if not great reviews. Since Arthur Shields had been forced into hospital with TB, it was Eddie Choate who had to have a talk with the troublesome leading lady. He explained what this revival meant to her, financially and artistically.33 She had a chance for a season to be the greatest tragic actress on the New York stage, and take down 10 per cent of the gate receipts each night. Allgood’s career, like Barry Fitzgerald’s, had been borne aloft on the plays of O’Casey, and Juno gave each their classic roles one last time, but the last performances of those roles could be the jumping-off point to a repertoire of kindred parts, both on Broadway and in Hollywood. In the play’s final act, Sara Allgood could reign over the stage, tough but warm-hearted, standing up sorrowfully with her pregnant, abandoned daughter for mothers of all helpless babies. With her magnificently musical voice, Allgood could summon all that was down under.

Having been brought to an appreciation of the situation, according to Choate, Sarah Allgood was ‘very, very happy’. Thereafter, she ‘reveled’ in the continuing publicity. (One can see how delighted she is with herself at the time in Carl Van Vechten’s portrait.) Juno ran until 13 April 1940 – 105 performances, not bad on Broadway for a revival sixteen years after the play’s opening. The triumph in O’Casey’s tragedy brought Sara Allgood renewed attention from Hollywood. In October 1940 she got eight and a half weeks’ work from Alexander Korda in That Hamilton Woman, as the improbably short, plump and lower-class mother of the naturally cultured beauty, Emma, Lady Hamilton (played by most-beautiful-skinny-woman-in-the-world, Vivien Leigh).34 Upon Allgood’s arrival in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock sent a car for her and she spent the weekend at his Bel Air estate. Fellow Catholics, she and the Hitchocks attended Mass together on the Sunday morning.

Early in January 1941 Allgood got a small part as the wife of a hopelessly schizophrenic mental patient in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Then came her biggest break yet: John Ford cast her as Beth Morgan, the mother of many sons and one beautiful daughter in How Green Was My Valley, produced by Twentieth Century Fox. This story of the despoliation of both coal-miners and the Welsh countryside is taken from a best-selling poetic novel by Richard Llewellyn. Owing to World War II, and attacks on Atlantic shipping, it could not be filmed in Wales and in colour, as planned. It was shot in the Santa Monica hills above Malibu, and therefore in black and white, so that greenness in that semi-arid, dull olive landscape might at least be imagined.35

The film script was primarily the work of Philip Dunne. John Ford was brought in by Darryl Zanuck as a replacement for William Wyler, the initial director. Ford and Dunne were old friends, both admirers of Robert Emmet, Michael Collins and other heroes of the Irish rebel tradition. They annually celebrated St Patrick’s Day together by getting drunk at the House of Murphy, 410 South Vincente, a hangout of the Hollywood Irish.36 Dunne asked Ford if he had anything to add to the script of How Green Was My Valley. He offered, as if in an afterthought, ‘Make the other prize-fighter a sort of second or handler for Dai Bando, and I’ll throw the part to that poor bastard Barry Fitzgerald, who can’t get a job.’37 This was untrue. Fitzgerald could get a job; his career was flourishing. Just as Ford had added Arthur Shields to Drums Along the Mohawk, he made room for his brother in How Green Was My Valley. He liked to create connections with the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Revival.

Although Ford made little further alteration to the screenplay, by other means he gave a new vision to the film as a whole; through casting, for instance, Ford Hibernicized the whole story. Not only was Barry Fitzgerald added, but Arthur Shields was brought in to play the deacon of the village church. Sara Allgood became Beth Morgan, mother of the family of miners, and her daughter was played by Maureen O’Hara. The film of How Green Was My Valley almost became an Abbey Theatre production, and the ensemble playing of the cast – ‘all star at the right moment’ – was perfect for the episodic, multithreaded nature of the narrative.38 None of these Irish actors spoke in Welsh accents, their own accents being deemed sufficiently Celtic for movie audiences. Donald Crisp (1880–1974) played the father, Gwilym Morgan, and Crisp, long resident in the United States, had been born in London. In one scene Ford made even him sing an obviously Irish drinking song. When Philip Dunne complained of this alteration to the script, Ford retorted, ‘Ah, go on! The Welsh are just another lot of micks and biddies, only Protestants!’

Filming went forward in July and August 1941. On one visit to the set, Philip Dunne found that Sara Allgood was ‘kicking up a fuss’.39 She had notions of herself as Dublin’s Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanor Duse rolled into one, yet in Hollywood after the talking pictures arrived, most bit-part actors had been stage stars somewhere else.40 No matter how great they were on the stages of their home countries, character actors in Hollywood were not supposed to require extra consideration, where every minute was costing thousands of dollars, and accountants were reporting daily progress – page by page of the script – to the studio chief, Darrryl Zanuck.

On the day Philip Dunne made his visit to the set, the local minister, Gruffydd (Walter Pigeon) was explaining a maths problem to young Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowell). How long does it take to fill a hundred-gallon bath at ten gallons a minute if the bath has a hole that empties at five gallons a minute? Sara Allgood as Beth Morgan is meant to scoff at the problem – ‘Who would pour water in an old bath full of holes?’ – and thus at the idea of education altogether, which her husband favours and she does not. Yet, after a few unusable takes, Allgood complained that the scene was badly written and therefore would not ‘play’. John Ford winked at Dunne, and then explained that Sara Allgood had a problem with the scene. Dunne (deliberately re-enacting one of Ford’s own fabled tales of the bullying of a troublesome star) ripped the page out of Allgood’s script, and said, ‘Now it plays.’ Ford then told Allgood that since the son-of-a-bitch writer would not help, they would just have to film it as written.

It is unclear what other trouble Allgood caused on set, but she made herself ‘distinctly unpopular’ with the whole crew, even with the Shields brothers.41 ‘A member of the cast told [Dunne] she was the one truly discordant member of the company; she got on with nobody.’ Ford made it plain to Dunne that he did not like Sara Allgood, in language that if recorded ‘would blister the page’.42 More importantly, fault was found with her performance. The role ought to have been perfect for the actress who had made her name in Juno and the Paycock. ‘If our father was the head of the house,’ the narrator Huw Morgan says, ‘our mother was its heart’. But as played by Allgood, the heart was not equal to the head, or the woman to the man.

Allgood makes a thunderous impact in one scene. Many miners, including several Morgan boys, want to organize a strike against the owner. Gwilym Morgan, the patriarch, opposes unions. So the younger miners hold a nighttime meeting around a bonfire on the hills. They accuse old Morgan of being in league with the mine-owner. Beth Morgan, taking along her youngest son Huw, goes out in the winter night to speak to the men. With her button nose and short, stout figure, snow swirling around, she stands up to the dark-coated men. In a voice of a deep vibrato with womanly higher registers and a bit of a burr, she gives the following speech:

I have come up here to tell you what I think of you all, because you are talking against my husband. You are a lot of cowards to go against him. He has done nothing against you and he never has and you know it well. How some of you, you smug-faced hypocrites, can sit in the same chapel with him I cannot tell. To say he is with the owners is not only nonsense but downright wickedness. There’s one thing more I’ve got to say and it is this. If harm comes to my Gwilym, I will find out the men and I will kill them with my two hands. And this I will swear by God Almighty.

It is an immense speech for a movie, and it is delivered with theatrical immensity. Hearing it and seeing her in that setting, one woman holding a child’s hand against so many men, one can understand why Allgood was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

So why did some, including members of the production team, find fault with Allgood’s performance? Andrew Sarris, the American film critic, thinks that the storyline was to blame for a weak Beth Morgan: ‘The emotional authority of the mother is fatally undermined when her youngest son Huw (the film’s point-of-view narrator) chose to leave home to live with and support his widowed sister-in-law (Anna Lee) for whom he feels a childhood longing of extraordinary delicacy.’43 Sarris is usually brilliant, but not here. Audiences know that Huw goes to his sister-in-law out of his own tender feelings, not because his mother does not give him the love he needs.

Philip Dunne, the scriptwriter, naturally thinks the script was not at fault. Before filming, he expected Sara Allgood to ‘steal the picture’. Some of the best lines in the script were hers, yet, Dunne says, she threw them away:

When Morgan offers Huw money for every bruise and scrape he incurs fighting in school, including a broken nose, she interjects, ‘fiercely’ according to my stage direction, ‘Break your old nose then! Break your mother’s heart every time you go from the house!’ This is aimed not at the boy but at his father. It is a direct confrontation, a questioning of his authority … It is an expression of the age-old differences between man and woman over the raising of a child. On the screen it comes off as none of these, merely a petulance.44

Dunne is not fair. Allgood’s rendering comes off as a heartfelt and deep criticism of her husband’s values, and of love for her frail youngest child, who had never really recovered from pneumonia after a drenching that snowy night when she confronted the miners’ union. Yet the delivery of that line is, according to Dunne, not Allgood’s only failure.

Perhaps the most powerful line in the entire movie was hers in the poignant scene after son Ivor has been killed and grandson born to the new widow, Bronwyn. Morgan says piously, ‘Give one, take the other,’ and she responds, ‘fiercely’ according to the stage direction, ‘Go to that girl up there and say that to her.’ ‘Hisht, now Beth,’ says Morgan, shocked, ‘do not kindle the wrath.’ She replies, ‘To hell with wrath!’ She raises her eyes directly to heaven and adds, ‘And I said it to be heard.’ This should have all the power and passion of the dying Beethoven shaking his fist at a louring sky. It is a direct and unequivocal defiance and daring of her God, in this deeply religious family, a deliberate and naked blasphemy. I had to negotiate a special waiver from the industry’s internal censorship for the line, including the word ‘hell’, which was then forbidden by the ‘Code’. What is more, I had intended it to pave the way for her line at the end of the picture when she senses that her husband is dead and tells [her daughter] Angharad of ‘the glory’ [s]he has seen. I was trying to show that at last she was at peace with her God, and her blasphemy forgiven. But there had been no blasphemy; the line was thrown away casually as [Allgood] exited the scene.45

Basically, the problem with Allgood’s performance, as Dunne sees it, is that she was meant to match Donald Crisp as the father, with a woman’s values given equal weight to the man’s, but when she is called upon to challenge him, she does not do it. She may criticize and complain, but in the end stays in her place, the obedient wife, in the kitchen, at the hearth, or in the sickroom.

Many explanations may be offered for such a lapse in courage by Sara Allgood, if that is what it was. It could be said, for instance, that during that period of history Irish women were generally more deferential to men than American women were. That generalization, however, would not cover the screen personality of Maureen O’Hara, often depicted throwing a roundhouse punch at a man. Or it could be said, on the assumption that individual psychology is the real source of acting, that Sara Allgood carried from childhood a certain deference toward her strict father. That suggestion, however, is contradicted by Allgood’s success in the portrayal of Juno Boyle. In the last act, Juno passes the dreadful judgment on stage that it would be better for a child to have no father at all, so long as that child had both a mother and a grandmother.

It could be said that in an Irish play, as in Irish Catholic culture of the era, oaths that took ‘the Lord’s name in vain’ were hardly regarded as a serious challenge to God or even blasphemies much worth confessing. That is one of the sources of satirical, sectarian comedy in The Playboy of the Western World and throughout O’Casey’s Dublin plays. Nor is blowing one’s top – kindling the wrath, as Gwilym puts it – a serious matter in Irish Catholic culture, though it is in the restrained households of Welsh Methodists. Sara Allgood, in short, may have been just playing Beth Morgan as an Irishwoman, because that is what John Ford wanted her to do, even though it clearly was not what Philip Dunne had indicated through his stage directions in the screenplay.

It is not evident from How Green Was My Valley that John Ford saw no difference at all between Welsh Protestants and Irish Catholics, as if they were all indistinguishable ‘micks and biddies’. Protestantism is in fact vividly set forth as a distinctive way of life and philosophy, an admirable philosophy too. ‘Prayer is just another name for good, clean, direct thinking,’ the preacher Mr Gruffydd (and love interest for Maureen O’Hara) teaches Huw, who has during his winter of convalescence lost the power to walk. ‘When you pray, think. Think well what you are saying. Make your thoughts into things that are solid. In that way, your prayer will have strength, and that strength will become a part of you, body, mind, and spirit.’ Thus taught, Huw learns to stand on his own two legs and walk again, walk like a man.

Irish Catholic attributes are depicted as well, affectionately, but not always admiringly. In a scene with lines added by Ford during filming, Barry Fitzgerald as Cyfartha is among a group at the head of the mine while far down the shaft at the coal-face, trapped by a cave-in, are Gwilym Morgan and others. Mr Gruffydd asks who will join a party to rescue Gwilym Morgan:

Dai Bando (Rhys Williams): I, for one. He is the blood of my heart. Come, Cyfartha.

Cyfartha (Barry Fitzgerald): Tis a coward I am. But I will hold your coat. 

How Green Was My Valley, 1941, left to right: Morton Lowry as Mr Jonas,
Rhys Williams as Dai Bando and Barry Fitzgerald as Cyfartha. (Lilly Library)

The line (an ad-lib invention by Ford and Fitzgerald) has become a classic moment of Hollywood’s Golden Age. It’s a good line, and could have been delivered effectively by Bob Hope; perhaps the only things that make it Irish are the syntactical inversion (‘Tis a coward I am’ for ‘I am a coward’) and the fact that Barry Fitzgerald says it, and he carries from his stage-past qualities of Captain Boyle from Juno and the Paycock, work-shy and full of fighting words; and of Fluther Good, who is so fabulously trained for barroom boxing.

One of the accidental consequences of Ford’s Hibernicizing of various parts in the play is that this reproduced the Allgood family household of the 1890s: a mixed marriage between a strict, bookish, working-class Protestant father and a Catholic mother of many children. Margaret Allgood did not share George Allgood’s view that children should be brought up strictly and everything sacrificed for their education. She obviously did not want them brought up as Protestants and, worse yet, Catholic-hating Protestants; however, she did not demand that Mr Allgood agree to them being raised as Catholics. No, she just brought them secretly to the Presentation Convent on George’s Hill, Dublin. 

Barry Fitzgerald, as Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, 1936;

in an encore performance as Fluther the barroom fighter from Four Men and a Prayer, 1938. (Shields family papers)

In a perhaps similar way, Sara Allgood as Beth Morgan does not agree with her husband on every matter, and she does not pretend to agree with him; but she does not fight him openly. While Gwilym Morgan wants his youngest son Huw to be able to box his corner, to make the grade at school, and to pursue one of the learned professions, instead of becoming a miner, Beth Morgan establishes a deep compact with him on another basis. Part of that compact is based on their love of the valley, in their love of the mining culture of their hometown where they live in a row of workers’ houses, but most of all in their love of family and especially of its head, Gwilym Morgan, who may sometimes be wrong, but is certainly good at heart.

How this compact between mother and youngest son is forged has something to do with the plot. They go out together on that snowy night when Beth speaks up for her husband. On her return, she falls into an icy pond and Huw saves her. They survive, but spend the whole winter in their bedrooms, he downstairs, she upstairs, communicating by knocks of a stick on his floor which is her ceiling. Ultimately, that non-verbal compact between Beth and Huw Morgan is visually realized, as in a film it must be. The picture below tells the story, as Huw communes with his mother after the death of his father, Gwilym. Huw looks upon his mother, and sees her seeing into another world, her lost past, a retrospective attitude that will become his own as an adult.  

Sara Allgood and Roddy McDowell in How Green Was My Valley, 1941. (Lilly Library)

8

Sara Allgood was pleased with her ‘wonderful eight weeks’ on set with John Ford. It was not, in respect of Sara Allgood, wonderful for him, and she had no idea at the time it would be her last engagement with John Ford. Still, at the close of shooting, she got a seven-year contract from Darryl Zanuck with Twentieth Century Fox.46 She gloried in her stardom. To celebrate, Una O’Connor took her out to dinner. Allgood could hardly contain her excitement; she was about to become very rich. By 28 October 1941, when How Green Was My Valley came out, Una O’Connor had been in Hollywood for ten years and had appeared in forty-three films; she knew the ropes.

‘Sally,’ she said, ‘don’t be too optimistic. Look again at your contract. I think you’ll find that each year there is an “option clause”.’47 The studio had options but she did not: it was Twentieth Century Fox work or nothing. And as soon as one signed a contract, one went on a ‘lay off’ for twelve weeks, which meant no salary at all, unless one was cast in another Twentieth Century Fox film.

After five weeks Allgood did get called for a new Twentieth Century Fox project. Now as a contract player, she evidently felt herself to be even grander than she had before felt herself to be. However, she was in for a rude shock. In the ‘Memories’ that she tearfully and self-consolingly began to write during the unemployed hours at her disposal afterwards, she recalls the painful incident: ‘What puzzles me is that no matter what the reputation and background an actor brings with him to Hollywood, one is put through the mill just as if one were a nonentity … The director kept nagging me about the intonation of a certain line. I kept practising and practising, doing all I could to please him, but at the end of the second day I was dismissed … I nearly had a nervous breakdown … for I thought I was disgraced forever.’48

That was not, of course, the end of Sara Allgood’s film career, though it may have been the end of her ‘airs and graces’ on Hollywood film sets. She was not nominated again for an Academy Award, but settled into regular work, at first for Twentieth Century Fox and later for other studios, twenty-six more films after How Green Was My Valley:

Una O’Connor (photo by Otto Dyar, Fox Studios, date unknown);

Una O’Connor as Ellen Bridges in Cavalcade, 1933. (Fox Films Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood, California)

Roxie Hart (1942), Mrs Morton

This Above All (1942), Waitress in a Tea Room

It Happened in Flatbush (1942), Mrs ‘Mac’ McAvoy

The War Against Mrs Hadley (1942), Mrs Michael Fitzpatrick

Life Begins at Eight Thirty (1942), Robert’s Aunt

City Without Men (1943), Maria Barton

Forever and a Day (1943), Cook

The Lodger (1944), Ellen

Jane Eyre (1944), Bessie

Between Two Worlds (1944), Mrs Midget

The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), Sister Martha

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Nona

Kitty (1945), Old Meg

The Spiral Staircase (1946), Nurse Baker

Cluny Brown (1946), Mrs Mailie

The Fabulous Dorseys (1947), Mrs Dorsey

Ivy (1947), Martha Huntley

Mother Wore Tights (1947), Grandmother McKinley

My Wild Irish Rose (1947), Mrs Brennan

Man from Texas (1948), Woman at wedding

One Touch of Venus (1948), Mrs Fogarty

The Girl from Manhattan (1948), Mrs Beeler

The Accused (1949), Mrs Conner

Challenge to Lassie (1949), Mrs MacFarland

Sierra (1949), Mrs Jonas

Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), Mrs Monahan

As a character actress, Allgood continued to suffer from what as an ex-star she felt to be lack of consideration by directors. At one point she was called in to replace Constance Collier in a bit part. Collier (1878–1955) was a tall, statuesque actress who had been a star on the London stage from 1901 to 1916. Oddly, like Sara Allgood, Constance Collier had lost her husband Julian L’Estrange, also an actor, in the 1918 influenza epidemic. With the arrival of the sound era, she became a leading voice coach in Hollywood (pupils included Eva LaGallienne and Marilyn Monroe), while continuing to take bit parts in films.

When Allgood arrived on the set to rehearse in place of Constance Collier, the director kept commanding her to relax her face, to ‘unfreeze’ her expression, as if she need not act at all. The direction confused Allgood. After three days she was dismissed, and went home crushed. The next day she found on returning to her apartment a gift of flowers and a letter of admiration from Constance Collier, a wise and articulate woman. That was a balm to the injured pride of the Irish actress. Allgood came to think of Los Angeles as the ‘city of lost angels’, a metropolis where the great actresses from the stages of the world wandered, well-paid but not decently respected.49 Still, actresses of her own age and even greater past celebrity, former stars like Lilian Gish, Judith Anderson and Ethel Barrymore, could not get roles on such a regular basis as Sara Allgood.50 Admittedly, Allgood was given only a little to do in any one film, often a minute or less on screen, yet she did it well. Her ponderosity and gravity of voice made a vivid impression without stealing the scene.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry shows her later career to advantage. The story centres on the Quincys, once the most important family in a small town, who have lost their money in the Depression. Harry Quincy, a middle-aged bachelor, has two sisters, one of them a widow, the other a pretty hypochondriac who reads the poems of Edgar Allan Poe in a room crowded with houseplants. Harry designs flower patterns for napkins in the town’s cloth factory. As the film begins, Harry has just painted his 6000th rosebud. Sara Allgood plays Nona, a servant who has practically become part of the family. Once a week she goes to the cowboy pictures with her suitor, a milkman, whom she will never marry. She and the two sisters fight over who is to be allowed to bake Harry’s pies, serve Harry his dinners, give Harry womanly advice. The conflict in the story is introduced by Mrs Brown, a modern and pretty company executive from New York, who takes a shine to Harry, as he does to her, causing the hypochondriac sister to make endless mischief, and worse than mischief: the other sister winds up dead from a cup of poisoned cocoa.

Allgood does not have many lines, but she is responsible for creating the sense that the Quincys have lived a long time together, too long in fact, trapped in a series of set routines that are driving them all crazy. During one argument between the sisters, Nona intercedes, in Allgood’s penetrating tones, ‘I don’t like what’s going on here.’ We understand that her words apply not just to the sisters’ quarrel but to the whole sick way of life of small-town American pseudo-cultured Anglo-aristocrats. The moral appears to be that, whatever about the old times, people like the Quincys have no value in the new capitalist democracy.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry is not the only film of the 1940s in which Sara Allgood played a kitchen maid, the sort of role that her former Dublin admirers found to be a sad embarrassment for their Cathleen ni Houlihan. In Jane Eyre, The Lodger and other films she played a maid, but to her credit she did not play them all the same way; each is significantly individual.

Certainly, in a Hollywood film, where the romantic plot dominates and youth and beauty are the coin of the realm, a woman who is past the age of sixty, wide-faced and wide all around, cannot come within an ass’s roar of getting a part as the female lead. This casting-by-appearance was less common in theatre, a fortiori in a repertory theatre with a small ensemble of players like the Abbey. There Sara Allgood, even though already short and round, could play the heroine Pegeen Mike in spite of the fact that physically she did not look the part of a Mayo publican’s pretty daughter. 51

She also easily suited roles as a tinker’s daughter or a woman of the Sidhe; an old woman or a young girl; Emer, wife of Cuchulain; or Dervogilla, the Queen of Breffny. That was a key aspect of the art of acting that theatre audiences in Ireland enjoyed and still enjoy, the play-acting aspect, in which bodily endowments are shown to matter very little compared with power of imagination, and Allgood had imagination. Rather than just being pretty, she could capture through acute observation and with a certain interpretive exaggeration how a pretty woman behaves. Without being a queen, she could satisfyingly ape grandiosity. Yet in Hollywood where there was nearly an infinite supply of actors of all ages, shapes and sizes, it was common practice to cast not against type but true to it. Where a beautiful woman was required, one of the many glamour girls was called up from Central Casting, and plenty of them had acting ability and screen personality on top of their beauty.

In England and the United States, the main markets for Hollywood films of the 1940s, middle-class people did have live-in servants, and often those servants were Irish (though more often still they were African-American).52 Films were often set in the present day, and pretended to provide a look at middle-class lives; these scenarios often enough had parts for a domestic. Furthermore, throughout the canon of novels and plays, there were roles for maids as gossips, know-it-alls and facilitators of the plot. Sara Allgood was good at getting all such parts and doing them well. Her own solitary status in life – decades away from any dating game – may have given her a certain sympathetic understanding of how to play one who is a close witness of, but not a participant in, matrimony. By playing maids, she made enough money to take a Hollywood flat off Santa Monica Boulevard and employ a maid herself.

In her second-to-last screen performance, Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), Allgood again plays a maid. The movie is a classic representation of post-war America, an X-ray of its sociology. In part, it is a biopic of Frank Gilbreth, a time-and-motion analyst, and thus the archetype of Taylorization, the scientifically efficient version of capitalism pioneered by United States corporations. It is also vividly representative of the place of fatherhood in the postwar period, when women, ‘liberated’ by their experience of doing men’s jobs while the war continued, were plunged back into a family role. Frank Gilbreth (Edward Buchanan) has twelve children (thus the title), all but one of whom are girls, and he struggles in a mildly choleric way to impose a business-like efficiency  on his large brood of females, to the tolerant, affectionate reaction of his wife (Myrna Loy) and daughters, who enter gamely into his schemes (even the wholesale removal of tonsils in a single day) but genially ignore his patriarchal commands about resisting fashion and pop-culture.

Sara Allgood does not have a big role. She has one line towards the start, and that line is not significant. Just as the family heads off packed into a car toward their new home in New Jersey, Allgood says, ‘Have a nice trip. We’ll see you Friday morning’ – nothing at all for an actress to work with. She has a second moment on screen bringing in the dishes to the family dinner in the new home just as Frank Gilbreth has learned that his proposal to give a scientific paper in Europe may not be accepted, but there is again no chance for her to do anything telling. Her final appearance on camera is after Frank Gilbreth has died of a heart attack, just before he was to give the scholarly paper that might have vindicated his theories. The children are crying on the front steps of the family home. Sara Allgood is comforting the little boy. He looks up to say, ‘Our daddy’s dead.’ The death of the father was an event frequent in families of the world in the 1940s, when sixty-two million died in war alone. But after daddy dies, Mrs Gilbreth gives his lecture for him and goes on to become a leading industrial engineer in her own right; in 1948, she was America’s Woman of Year. While Sara Allgood has little to say or do in Cheaper by the Dozen, her mere presence as female family stalwart is significant. It evokes Juno Boyle, and her astonishing line that a child who has no father may still have what is better, two mothers.

When during the 1940s Sara Allgood wrote letters to friends in Dublin, or when she recorded her memories, she was inclined to look upon the days in the past as her glory days, and to say, ‘O I wish I was on the Abbey stage again.’53 She had, in fact, been saying just that since 1914, when she was working with the Liverpool Repertory Company; she said it when she was in Australia; she said it when she was a star of London’s West End. She had become ‘hardened’, she said, by doing bit parts in Hollywood studio pictures. Yet it paid well and placed her on a common footing with the greatest actors in the world. There is every sign that Sara Allgood liked it in the United States. She had her hotel apartment at 1015 Larrabee Street in Hollywood, just east of Beverly Hills, between Santa Monica and San Vincente boulevards, overlooking the valley, and only a short distance from the homes of Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur Shields, whom, along with Una O’Connor, she saw regularly. A sister of the Shields brothers moved into the same district, along with her family. This area was a little Dublin within Hollywood. Sara Allgood became the godmother of Christine, daughter of Aideen and Arthur Shields, born on 16 October 1946. Five years after she settled in Los Angeles, and after the war had ended, when she could easily have returned to Dublin, Sara Allgood took US citizenship.

Notes

1. Sara Allgood to Joseph Holloway, 27 January 1914, Holloway MSS, NLI.

2. Sara Allgood, ‘Memories’, Belfast Public Record Office, p. 96. In February 1914, Allgood was also in James Sexton’s The Riot Act, produced by Liverpool Repertory Company; see The Times (4 February 1914), 6.

3. Joseph Holloway, diary for 15 April 1939, Hogan and O’Neill, Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, vol. 3, 1938–1944 (Proscenium Press: Dixon, California, 1970), pp. 25–6.

4. The London production of Juno was at the Royalty Theatre; see The Times (18 November 1925), 12.

5. The three Hitchcock films in which Allgood appeared were Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930) and Sabotage (1936). For Douglas Byng, see Allgood, ‘Memories’, p. 98.

6. Retitled Storm over Patsy, the play opened on 8 March 1937 at the Guild Theatre and ran for forty-eight performances.

7. A capable actor, hoofer and crooner, Dowling had been given his start as a Broadway producer in 1919 with the Ziegfield Follies. In 1926 he discovered a 200-pound 19-year-old singer, Kate Smith (1907–86), whose rendition of ‘God Bless America’ became a second national anthem. Now he was breaking into the production of serious literary theatre, a move that would lead him to introduce Tennessee Williams to Broadway with The Glass Menagerie in 1945.

8. Ryan, The Company I Kept, p. 62.

9. Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy opened at the Ambassador Theatre on 2 October 1937, and was a failure both with the audience and the critics; it was taken off after five nights. However, Lennox Robinson’s The Far Off Hills, which replaced it on stage, ran for six weeks. Aideen O’Connor to Maeve O’Connor, 18 November 1937, Shields family papers, NUI Galway.

10. May Higgins, ‘Biographical notes’, F.R. and May Higgins papers, NLI.

11. F.R. Higgins to May Higgins, 24 October 1937, F.R. and May Higgins papers, NLI.

12. F.R. Higgins to Eric Gorman, 10 November 1937, Hotel Edison, New York, F.R. and May Higgins papers, NLI. Eddie Dowling’s birth name was Joseph Nelson Goucher.

13. In a communication acceding to this arrangement, the Abbey Board – Frank O’Connor, Ernest Blythe, Walter Starkie, and Richard Hayes – expressed its amazement that Higgins had not simply approved the original offer of an Abbey production of the play on Broadway. Abbey Minute Books, 17 November 1937, Acc 3961, NLI.

14. New Yorker Carl Van Vechten was many things: novelist, dance critic, impresario (‘the Harlem Renaissance’ was of his manufacture) and friend of an astonishing range of people, including Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, George Moore and Zora Neale Hurston. He was also a gifted amateur photographer.

15. Van Vechten spoke with Allgood after a 21 March 1938 performance. Carl Van Vechten to Dorothy Peterson [22 March 1938], Bruce Kellner (ed.), Letters of Carl Van Vechten, (Yale UP: New Haven 1987), p. 159.

16. J.M. Synge, Plays: Book I, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, in vol. III, J.M. Synge: The Collected Works (Colin Smythe: Gerrards Cross: Bucks. and Catholic University of America Press: Washington DC 1982), p. 27.

17. William Hazlitt, Essays (Blackie and Son: London, Glasgow, and Bombay: 1906), p. 41. My thanks to Mary O’Malley.

18. C.S. Andrews, Dublin Made Me: An Autobiography (Mercier Press: Dublin and Cork 1979), pp. 99, 124. See also the witness statement of Mairín Cregan to the Bureau of Military History, reported in Annie Ryan, Witnesses: Inside the Easter Rising (Liberties Press: Dublin 2005). She recalls going with her friends, future leaders of the Free State, to the Abbey Theatre every Saturday night during her university years prior to the 1916 Rising (p. 46). Many more examples could be adduced of future political leaders who had been patriotically inspired by the plays and players of the Abbey Theatre.

19. In The Old Woman Remembers, Allgood as Shan Van Vocht recited the sad proud history of Ireland, lighting one candle for every hundred years of suffering, seven candles in all (Abbey Theatre, 31 December 1924).

20. ‘Abbey Theatre Ceremony’, unidentified newspaper clipping (29 September 1932), Abbey Minute Books, NLI.

21. W.B. Yeats to Frank Fay, 13 August 1906, quoted in Saddlemyer, Theatre Business, p. 139.

22. ‘Abbey Theatre Ceremony’, unidentified newspaper clipping (29 September 1932), Abbey Minute Books, NLI.

23. W.B. Yeats, Explorations (Macmillan: New York 1962), p. 364.

24. Speaking literally, this was not the case with Riders to the Sea, since Synge drafted the play in the summer of 1902 before he became familiar with Sara Allgood.

25. Hazlitt, Essays, p. 41.

26. The story here of Allgood’s early life is taken from her unpublished ‘Memories’ (Belfast PRO, op. cit).

27. See the obituary of G.H. Mair, The Times (4 January 1926), 14. After the outbreak of war in 1914, Mair worked ‘in a confidential capacity’ for the Ministry of Information and was he was the assistant director in the League of Nations Secretariat. Mair and Allgood had a son and a daughter.

28. Sean O’Casey to Frank McCarthy, 6 December 1950: Krause, Letters of Sean O’Casey, vol. 2, p. 758.

29. According to other sources, Sara Allgood married Henson in Melbourne at a registry office in September 1916, and in a religious ceremony at Central Methodist Mission in Sydney in January 1917. See Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renascence (Colin Smythe: Gerrards Cross, Bucks. 1979), p. 202.

30. ‘Births’, The Times (14 March 1918), 1.

31. Coxhead, Daughters of Erin, p. 206.

32. Choate-Shields Productions contracts, 15 January 1940, Shields family papers, NUI Galway.

33. Eddie Choate to Robert Edmond Jones, 8 February 1940, Shields family papers, NUI Galway.

34. Charles Drazin, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (Sidgwick and Jackson: London 2002), p. 233.

35. Philip Dunne, ‘How Green Was My Valley’: The Screenplay for the Darryl F. Zanuck Film Production, Directed by John Ford (Santa Teresa Press: Santa Barbara, California 1990), p. 20.

36. Ibid. p. 25.

37. Ibid. p. 26.

38. Chicago Herald-Examiner (8 March 1933), Abbey Theatre scrapbooks, NLI.

39. Dunne, ‘How Green Was My Valley’, p. 27.

40. On 16 May 1941, Sara Allgood wrote to Joseph Holloway to thank him for writing of her in the newspaper as being in the company of Duse and Bernhardt; Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal, vol. 3 (Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois; Feffer and Simons: London and Amsterdam 1967), p. 60.

41. Aideen O’Connor to Eddie Choate, 23 August 1941, Shields family papers, NUI Galway.

42. Dunne, ‘How Green Was My Valley’, p. 32.

43. Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, p. 197.

44. Dunne, ‘How Green Was My Valley’, p. 31.

45. Ibid. p. 32.

46. ‘Fox has signed Sara Algood to a term contract’, New York Times (29 August 1941).

47. Allgood, ‘Memories’, p. 106. For details on Hollywood contracts, see Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–39 (Scribner’s Sons: New York 1993), p. 145.

48. Allgood, ‘Memories’, p. 108. It is unclear what director dismissed Allgood; perhaps Reuben Mamoulian or William Wellman. According to The New York Times of 30 October 1941, Allgood was to play opposite Henry Fonda in Rings on her Fingers (directed by Reuben Mamoulian), but does not appear in the final cast. She was also initially to be in the cast with Fonda in The Oxbow Incident (directed by William Wellman) and then replaced by Florence Bates (New York Times, 17 June 1942). My guess is that it was Mamoulian, because, under Wellman’s direction, Allgood performed  adequately as the matron of a women’s prison in Roxie Hart, before filming began on The Oxbow Incident.

49. Allgood, ‘Memories’. Allgood does not identify the director or film in question.

50. Charles Affron, Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life (University of California Press 2002), p. 303.

51. Sara Allgood played Pegeen Mike only when her sister Molly was not in the cast; when she was, Sara played the Widow Quin, as in the opening production in 1907.

52. In the 1860, in a population survey of Jersey City, NJ, 76 per cent of the Irish female workforce was employed in domestic service. Generally, an Irish maid washed on Monday, swept on Tuesday, courted on Thursday, cleaned on Friday, and baked on Saturday; every day of the week, she cooked, served food, answered the door, and took messages. She never made enough money, obviously, to retire at ease. See J.P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame 1992), passim.

53. A wish reported in a letter from Gabriel Fallon to Maire [nic Shiublaigh], 20 November 1947, NLI MS 27631.