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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 Hollywood‘Sara Allgood was a great – a very great – stage actress, who managed to transform many poor feature films in which she appeared into works of art,’ wrote one of the most respected film historians of our day, Anthony Slide of this Abbey luminary, whom Hollywood tormented into an abyss of despair.Allgood, known to her friends as Sally, was born in Dublin on October 31st 1893 into a family that might have been considered ‘comfortable’ in those days. Her father provided for his eight children through his job as a proofreader with a publishing firm. She was educated at the Marlborough Street Training College in Dublin, which she left at the age of fourteen full of dreams of becoming an actress like her idol Sarah Bernhardt. It would have been a heady dream for a working-class girl in the Dublin of the day, were it not for the existence of a small amateur drama group called the National Theatre Society that was staging works drawn from Irish history. The Society was later to merge with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Irish Literary Theatre to become The Abbey. The acclaimed Irish poet Padraig Colum would vividly remember his first sight of the teenage Allgood in her first role with the Society in Yeats’s The King’s Threshold. “I recall one evening when some young men and women, all with office or workshop employments, gathered in a small hall in a side street in Dublin to make a third attempt to gain an audience of a few hundred for plays dealing with Irish life and tradition. Benches had been put together, a platform had been built, and amateurs… were assembled for a rehearsal of a new play by William Butler Yeats,” the poet told. ‘Who is the new girl?’ someone asked referring to Allgood. “The new recruit had dark hair parted in the centre and a face that somehow had a doll-like contour,” Colum recollected. “Suddenly she had taken on an extraordinary dignity. The voice was resonant; it had a deep and moving quality. And the girl was making something significant of what she had to do. I saw Yeats turn to W.G. Fay (a key founding member of the Abbey and that play’s director) (and say), ‘Fay, you have an actress there.’ ” Allgood would become one of the great Abbey actors, hailed by theatre critics world-wide for her creations of some of the immortal characters that would be born of O’Casey, Yeats and Synge, most notably the title role of Juno, the poverty-stricken but proud wife and mother in O’Casey’s classic work of tenement life in Dublin, Juno and the Paycock. She would later reprise the role on screen under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock in a British production that would pave the way for Allgood’s call to Hollywood and to a way of life for which she was utterly unprepared. By now an internationally recognised actress, a veteran of the London and Broadway stages and with several British films to her credit, including Hitchcock’s Blackmail, Allgood was summoned to Hollywood for the pivotal role as mother to Lady Emma Hamilton in the classic That Hamilton Woman. This “earnest” person, as the poet Padraig Colum had described her, an actress who held her art above all, came to a Hollywood that in 1939 was perhaps at its most capricious, and deserving of its new moniker ‘Tinseltown’. A new word had entered the lingo; that word, as Allgood would learn to her eternal regret, was ‘bankability’.
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