 |
 |
|
||
|
|||
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 HollywoodAllgood could never come to terms with the fact that her talent would now take second place to her drawing power at the box office when it came to the casting process. For a moment fickle Hollywood had the welcome mat out for the Abbey actress, and briefly she had her hour in the arclight. ‘The delay in Miss Allgood’s arrival in American film is strange,’ piped the New York Herald Tribune following the release of That Hamilton Woman in 1941. ‘Consider these facts. She has an international reputation on the stage. Hollywood has never had enough good actresses of her type, and Miss Allgood for years has been interested in doing film.’Her most singular triumph came with a major role later that same year in John Ford’s screen adaptation of How Green Was My Valley co-starring Barry Fitzgerald and a rising Irish screen star Maureen O’Hara. Allgood was nominated for an Oscar for her work in the film which garnered no fewer than six Academy Awards that year. Then something happened that is simply inexplicable. Hollywood shut the door in Allgood’s face. Despite her monumental talent, glowing praise from the critics and an Oscar nomination, the offers of good roles for the now middle-aged actress dwindled to a trickle. “Sally went to Hollywood with high hopes. Being the great artist that she was it was a great shock to her, to say the least, to be treated in a high-handed manner,” the actress’s niece, Mrs Pauline Page, confided to Anthony Slide, one-time director of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. “I’ll never forget one thing she said to me when I was in her beautiful Spanish home in Beverly Hills. She hadn’t been getting much work and Mr Bernie (Allgood’s agent) was urging her to give a big party and invite important people to it. Sally was dreadfully depressed and later said to me, ‘I could never do a thing like that. I could never prostitute my art.’ Another thing she said to me, ‘When you go back to your home and your family, you can think of me sitting alone… afraid to go out for fear I should miss a call to work.’ ” Allgood did play some small parts in a number of movies, usually for 20th Century Fox, after that but the characters were mostly clichéd Irish maids or old Irish mothers, roles which never allowed her to display her true worth on screen. Her final role in Hollywood came in Cheaper By The Dozen (1950), a 20th Century Fox production. “The salary is cut to the bone, but no matter, it’s activity, and that’s the main thing,” Allgood wrote to a friend, Gabrielle Fallon, in Dublin. It would be her last letter home. A heart attack took her that same year as she ‘waited for the phone to ring’ in Hollywood. ‘For those who saw her even once on the screen or on the actual stage, the announcement of the death of Sara Allgood is bound to leave a deep sense of loss,’ lamented Padraig Colum.
|
[ Back to top ]
All Material © 1999-2009 Irelandseye.com and contributors
