 |
 |
|
||
|
|||
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 HollywoodBarry Fitzgerald’s houseA centre of hospitality for many a friend from the old days in Dublin, Fitzgerald and Shields lived most of their later lives in California. While Barry stayed on in Hollywood, Arthur set up home in Santa Barbara, California, which he festooned with pictures of Dublin, old Abbey posters and playbills. The brothers remained inseparable in their self-imposed exile, but parted ways when it came to leisure activities. Barry was a motorcycle fiend and loved nothing more than gunning his Harley Davidson through the Hollywood Hills with an Iroquois Native American pal, Gus Tallon. Arthur, on the other hand, preferred the more leisurely pursuit of stamp collecting. Common to both was their love of old friends and they continued for many years to provide open house for many others from home who would wander through the film town. One such was a fiendishly handsome young actor from Cork, Kieron O’Annrachain, known to the world of international theatre and film by this time as Kieron Moore, Playing the dark-eyed bully Pony Sugrue, he gave Sean Connery almost as good as he got in that Walt Disney celebration of Ireland of the shamrocks, Darby O’Gill and the Little People with Jimmy O’Dea playing the king of the Leprechauns. Moore, another who first trod the boards professionally at the Abbey, was born in Skibbereen in County Cork, the son of a fiercely nationalistic Gaelic-speaking family. It was an inheritance that burned deep. “Even today, although I think in English now, I say my prayers in Irish,” Moore would confess to Walt Disney publicist Joe Reddy many years later when he called Hollywood his home in the 1950s. It was Moore’s passion for the Gaelic language that led him to the Abbey Theatre when he was still in his teens. He wrote, produced and acted in an Irish language play that went on in a small theatre in Dublin just around the corner from the Abbey. The production closed within the week and Moore and his backers were out of pocket to the tune of £30, a vast sum in a city where a working man brought home £2 a week, if he was lucky. In a desperate, almost naïve attempt to recoup the enormous loss for his backers, Moore, who was then just seventeen years old, fired off a letter to the Irish Taoiseach Eamon De Valera, explaining the predicament. De Valera, a voice in the movement to restore the Gaelic language, sent Moore a personal cheque for £30 by return mail. Subsequently he was summoned in to see Frank Dermody, director of the Abbey. “The message I got was to come in and audition for a secondary role in an Irish language production. It was the first time I met Frank Dermody (a powerful figure in Irish theatre), and I was terrified.” Moore was cast in leading role in the production. “I was good, but not fantastically so,” Moore remembered of that career-defining moment. The role led to the offer of a full-time job at the Abbey, with Moore playing lead roles and bit parts (“there was no star system at the Abbey,” Moore explained) in a variety of productions from William Butler Yeats’s Kathleen Ni Houlihan to The Lost Leader, a Gaelic version of Tristan and Isolde, and The Rugged Path in which Robert Clark, head of Associated British Picture Corporation spotted him. A summons to a screen test in London followed – and that’s when the trouble began. Moore threw some clothes in an old suitcase and was off to London. The British film company was so impressed by Moore’s presence in the film test that he was offered a seven-year contract. The excited seventeen-year-old sent word home to Ireland of the great news and received by return a flat ‘permission refused’ dispatch from his father. Still legally a minor, Moore could not sign that passport to the silver screen without his father’s consent. Bitterly disappointed but now utterly consumed with determination to pursue his acting career, he doggedly planted himself in London. He scraped by with work in repertory theatre and managed to get some film work. His performance in a production of Sean O’Casey’s Red Roses For Me earned him a contract with Alexander Korda’s film company. This time there was no parental veto barring his way and Moore was no longer the gangly youth who had left Dublin with a dream and a cardboard suitcase. He was a swarthy, tall, confident leading man who knew his way around a film sound stage. ‘He has dark brown curly hair and large liquid eyes. Although his name and upbringing are as Irish as the shamrock, he could be mistaken for a Spaniard, an Italian, a Frenchman or a South American,’ one enamoured journalist wrote of him. His reputation grew on the British screen, with such films as Anna Karenina in which he co-starred with Vivien Leigh, and A Man About The House in which he played an Italian. Moore quickly drew the attention of Hollywood. Roles in American films incuded 20th Century Fox’s David and Bathsheba and Columbia’s Ten Tall Men, and of course Walt Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
|
[ Back to top ]
All Material © 1999-2009 Irelandseye.com and contributors
