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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 HollywoodIf Allgood had become a victim of that all too common affliction that continues to bedevil the industry today – a dearth of strong roles for mature actresses – her male colleagues from the Abbey had no such torments. The brothers Fitzgerald and Shields were working in major roles regularly, as was another member of the Gaelic sanctum, Dudley Digges, during the 1940s. Though Digges, also a founding member of the Abbey, landed in Hollywood as a mature, reluctant visitor of fifty-one years, he went on to star and feature in more than fifty movies, including the 1930 version of Mutiny on the Bounty and a 1931 production of The Maltese Falcon. Born in Dublin in 1879, Digges got his first training at the Abbey which he joined in 1901 and where he and Allgood formed a lifelong friendship. Barry Fitzgerald revered Digges whom he credited for encouraging him to take those first walk-on roles at the Abbey so many years before. Digges was one of the first of the Abbey troupe to emigrate to the U.S. when he joined the Manhattan Theatre and later became a central figure in the formation of the famous New York Theatre Guild in 1919. Appearing in more than 3,500 performances with the Guild, Digges was a lauded Broadway actor, praised for his dynamic stage presence and remarkable voice, a gift that Hollywood craved most when the talkies arrived in the late 1920s. To its horror, the movie industry discovered that the voices of many famous silent-screen names were completely unsuitable for the talking pictures. Hollywood careers were crashing left and right as swashbuckling actors squeaked lines in high-pitched nasal tones and beautiful sirens muttered indistinct words in heavily accented European or Bronx accents. When the call went out to from Hollywood for ‘actors who could speak lines,’ Digges was among the first recruits.But the instant fame that Digges achieved in the Hollywood of the Thirties and Forties with its glitzy premieres, industry parties and carefully managed hierarchical system did not sit easily with this balding, somewhat rotund and mature stage thespian. He joined his fellow Abbey veterans nightly in homely get-togethers, mostly at Fitzgerald’s house, and surrounded himself with books, mostly Irish classics. A constant disappointment to journalists seeking headlines, Digges told one writer, “I’m really a dull fellow. I’ve managed to get through life without important or exciting incident. What I have to show I show upon the stage. I don’t have adventures and I don’t make headlines.” But he did make movies, great movies, with such milestones as The General Dies at Dawn (1936), Valiant is the Word for Carrie (1936), and Raffles (1940) among his myriad credits. ‘Ireland is his first love, the stage his second,’ The New York Times wrote of Digges in 1944, so it was perhaps fitting that his final role came not in Hollywood but on Broadway in the original production of the Eugene O’Neill classic The Iceman Cometh, in which he created the role of the saloon keeper. One evening during the run of the play he confided in a friend, “Do you know that this play gives me about forty-three years in the New York Theatre?” He never mentioned Hollywood. “I’ve just been sitting here thinking how lucky I have been to keep with good things and good people.” He died of a stroke just a few months after the final curtain of the production following a long bout of failing health. He was sixty-eight. An obituary in the Daily News said simply, ‘He delighted American audiences for forty-three years with his stage and screen characterisations.’ If Digges felt out-of-step in Hollywood in his day there was one place in the film town he could always call home, and that was Barry Fitzgerald’s house.
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