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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
The Abbey Theatre - Lost and Found in HollywoodAs Hollywood sought more and more reality and authenticity in the 1940s, the movie moguls stepped up the worldwide search for a new breed of acting talent that could bring to the screen renowned theatrical backgrounds. Broadway was mined – but so too were the great theatres of the world. To Hollywood came a new generation of Irish actor, a generation spawned of the country’s first national theatre, the famed Abbey Players. It is one of the great inconsistencies of Irish history that the Irish – with their distinctive temperament, flair for self-expression and poetry – had no real tradition of drama. Yet Ireland has produced more writers and performers for its size than any other nation. The growth of Irish drama was stunted with the demise of the Old Gaelic Order, but with a resurgence of nationalist spirit, poetry, literature and theatre in the twilight years of the nineteenth century a new dramatic energy was born. This extraordinary artistic meld of art and nationalism was sowing the seeds for an infant Irish native theatre, The Abbey Theatre. Providing the great energy behind the renaissance were such literary and stage luminaries as W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Sara Allgood, and J.M. Synge, the poet and playwright.“We have a popular imagination that is fiery, magnificent and tender, so that those who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the spring-time of local life has been forgotten and the harvest is a memory only and the straw has been turned into bricks.”The fruit of this renaissance was plucked by Hollywood. And those who came from that illustrious Abbey stage to colonise the film town were easily the strangest misfits that Tinseltown has ever seen. The gnome-like Irishman shuffled out of the laundry shop into the pounding summer heat of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to continue his quest. The battered tweed suit and cap that he was wearing would have been more appropriate for a chill Irish winter than the heat-wave that was choking him in Los Angeles. The man was none other than Barry Fitzgerald, and he was on a quest for his clothes. He’d left them into some dry cleaning establishment or other on the Sunset strip and had completely forgotten which one. Fitzgerald, the loveable little genius from Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre, the rogue priest from Going My Way, one of the biggest box office hits of 1944 (which co-starred Irish-American Bing Crosby) was spending his day wandering in and out of dry cleaning shops in the somewhat confusing new world he had found himself, far from his beloved native Dublin. The world and Hollywood had fallen in love with the diminutive actor and he was all at sea. Being a Hollywood movie star was new to him and so was Hollywood. ‘He finds it all rather bewildering,’ Fred Stanley wrote in the New York Times in 1945 of Fitzgerald’s transplant from the boards of the Abbey to fame in Hollywood. ‘He resents the disruption of his previously inconspicuous private life. He can’t even browse in Los Angeles bookshops or join in a discussion with strangers at some out-of-the-way bar-room or drug store without being targeted as Father Fitzgibbon. His old clothes and cloth cap, which once kept him inconspicuous, now make him a marked man.’
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