This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Lawrence William White. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 24 November 1913, Ireland
Died: 17 July 2005
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Fitzgerald, Geraldine Mary Wilma (1913–2005), actress and stage director, was born 24 November 1913 at 85 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin, one of two daughters and two sons of Edward Martin Fitzgerald (1886–1965), a lawyer, who was Roman catholic, and his wife Edith Marie (née Richards) (c.1890–1963), a protestant. The family later lived in Greystones, Co. Wicklow. Her father, called to the Irish bar in 1907, served in the British military in the first world war, practised as a barrister in London, then returned to Ireland and joined the prominent family firm of solicitors (D. and T. Fitzgerald, mentioned in Ulysses by James Joyce), eventually becoming senior partner.
EARLY STAGE AND SCREEN CAREER
Educated at convent schools (probably in both England and Ireland), Geraldine studied for three years at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, before turning to acting, coached in technique by her maternal aunt, the actress Shelah Richards. Appearing in eight plays in the 1933/4 season of the Dublin Gate Theatre, she was praised for ‘a quality of poise which is not usually found in combination with her youth and charm’ (Hobson, 50). Her most substantial Gate role was that of Isabella Linton in a stage adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’, starring Micheál MacLiammóir as Heathcliff; she also played the high-spirited Ilse in ‘Children in uniform’, the controversial crypto-lesbian drama by Christa Winsloe. Moving to London in 1934, she began acting in films, and was well-reviewed in Turn of the tide (1935), about two feuding Yorkshire fishing families, and as the heroine, Maggie Tulliver, in The mill on the Floss (1937). She infatuated the writer Patrick Hamilton – who stalked her obsessively and was enraged by her rebuffs – and inspired the character of the venomous and ill-fated Netta Longdon in his grim novel of pre-war Earl’s Court, Hangover Square (1941).
Fitzgerald married (1936) Edward William Lindsay-Hogg (1910–99), who latterly succeeded as 4th baronet of Rotherfield Hall (1987), a gentleman horse-racing enthusiast and dilettante playwright; the marriage was dissolved in 1946. They had one son, Michael Edward Lindsay-Hogg (b. 1940), 5th baronet, a theatre, film, and television director (whose credits include music videos, the Beatles documentary Let it be (1970), the Grenada television series Brideshead revisited (1981), and two films of Irish interest: Frankie starlight (1995) and, in the Gate Theatre’s ‘Beckett on film’ series, Waiting for Godot (2001)). Hoping to further her husband’s songwriting ambitions, Fitzgerald moved with him to New York in 1938, and soon appeared on Broadway in the ingénue role of Ellie Dunn in the Mercury Theatre production of ‘Heartbreak House’ by George Bernard Shaw, directed by and starring another Gate Theatre alumnus, Orson Welles. The play’s producer, John Houseman, remembered the unannounced arrival of ‘an unbelievably lovely young woman with dark-red Irish hair’, and was ‘stunned by her beauty’ (Houseman (1973), 349). Fitzgerald, who had an affair with Welles, in later years described his charisma as akin to a lighthouse: ‘when you were caught in its beam, you were bathed in its illumination; when it moved on, you were plunged into darkness’ (quoted in Callow (1995), 364). (Fitzgerald, it would seem, was bathed repeatedly in the light of Welles’s rotating beam: rumours persist that he fathered her son; and Welles’s eldest daughter, Chris, describes his sharing a Santa Monica beach house with Fitzgerald in spring 1947 – several months after her second marriage – on terms of easy familiarity with the neighbouring household of Chris, her mother (Welles’s first wife), and her mother’s second husband: an arrangement markedly libertine, even by Hollywood standards.)
HOLLYWOOD REBEL
Signed to a seven-year contract by Warner Brothers Pictures, Fitzgerald insisted on a clause (conceded reluctantly by the studio) that allowed her perform in theatre for six months every year. Her first two Hollywood films, released in the same month (April 1939), were both box-office smashes. In the Warners melodrama Dark victory she gave a ‘sentient and touching portrayal’ (New York Times, 21 April 1939) as the responsible, devoted friend of a vibrant but wilful socialite (played by Bette Davis, who remained a lifelong personal friend) doomed by a malignant brain tumour; the cast also included George Brent, Humphrey Bogart and Ronald Reagan. On loan to the Goldwyn studio, she reprised her Gate Theatre role as Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights (dir. William Wyler), opposite Laurence Olivier in his breakthrough cinematic role as Heathcliff, with Merle Oberon and David Niven. Fitzgerald received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. One British film historian has written that she was the only actor in the film who ‘looked as if she’d read the book’ (Irish Times, 23 July 2005), and Olivier, disowning the film in later years, said that Fitzgerald ‘was the only thing that still holds up’ (Washington Post, 20 July 2005).
Despite these promising debuts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood career rapidly foundered. Over the next seven years, she made twelve more films, her co-stars including Alan Ladd, John Garfield, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Barbara Stanwyck and Loretta Young. She either refused or was denied by studio executives (sources differ) the lead femme fatale role of Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese falcon, and refused the part of Melanie Hamilton (played by Olivia de Havilland) in Gone with the wind. Her values moulded by the lofty artistic standards of the Gate and Mercury companies, she disdained Hollywood commercialism, aspired only to make worthy films with solid scripts, and defied the rigid strictures of the studio system by her undaunted commitment to live theatre (acting regularly in stage plays in the Los Angeles area), and spirited refusals of what she deemed inferior roles. Warners retaliated by confining her to B pictures and second female leads, and regularly suspended her for insubordination, or loaned her to rival studios. She supported Davis again in Watch on the Rhine (1943; screenplay by Dashiell Hammett from the play by Lillian Hellman), as the dissatisfied wife of an aristocratic Nazi agent. After appearing in Wilson (1944) as Edith, the eponymous American president’s resolute second wife, she was featured glamorously in a Life magazine cover story (7 August 1944). In the weirdly compelling thriller The strange affair of Uncle Harry (1945), she played the neurotically (perhaps incestuously) possessive spinster sister of the title character (played by George Sanders).
Directed by Max Reinhardt (in his last professional undertaking), Fitzgerald returned triumphantly to the Broadway stage in ‘Sons and soldiers’ (1943), opposite Gregory Peck; one critic lauded her performance as the finest he had ever seen. Fitzgerald married secondly (1946) Stuart Scheftel (1910/11–1994), a wealthy New York businessman, heir to the Macy’s department store fortune, patron of the arts, civic leader and occasional political aspirant; their one daughter, Susan, became a clinical psychologist. On leaving Hollywood, Fitzgerald resided permanently in New York, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She made two films in Britain, both with dark Victorian settings: So evil my love (1948), with Ray Milland, and The late Edwina Black (1952), with Roland Culver. In the early 1950s she concentrated on television work, appearing in many anthology drama series.
STAGE ACTING AND DIRECTING
Resuming her stage career in the mid 1950s, Fitzgerald appeared widely in classical and contemporary drama, performing many of the leading female roles of the twentieth-century repertoire. She played Jennifer Dubedat in Shaw’s ‘The doctor’s dilemma’ (1955); was directed by and acted opposite Orson Welles as Goneril in his controversial Broadway production of ‘King Lear’ (1956); and was directed by John Houseman as Gertrude in ‘Hamlet’ (1958) in the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre, Stratford, Connecticut. Appearing as the Queen in ‘The cave dwellers’ (1961) by William Saroyan, she was directed by her son Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Her interpretations of Eugene O’Neill were especially distinguished. She played Essie Miller in ‘Ah, wilderness!’ at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, DC (1969), and at the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut (1974); the latter production, directed by Arvin Brown, transferred to Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre (1975), and was filmed for television by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) (1976). Her most critically acclaimed role was in another O’Neill play, as Mary Tyrone in ‘Long day’s journey into night’ (1971), directed by Brown in an off-Broadway production, with Robert Ryan, James Naughton and Stacy Keach. She reprised the role with the Philadelphia Drama Guild (1975) (where she also played Amanda Wingfield in ‘The glass menagerie’ by Tennessee Williams). She was Nora Melody in O’Neill’s ‘A touch of the poet’ (1977), opposite Jason Robards and Milo O’Shea.
Her long association with Arvin Brown and the Long Wharf included the part of Juno Boyle in ‘Juno and the Paycock’ (1973) by Sean O’Casey; she also starred, opposite Milo O’Shea, in Brown’s revival of a long-neglected musical version of the play, staged initially at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (1974), and (under the title ‘Daarlin’ Juno’) at Long Wharf (1976); Fitzgerald collaborated in adapting the original score, lyrics and book, by Marc Blitzstein and Joseph Stein. She performed twice, in separate roles, in Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our town’, as Mrs Webb with American Shakespeare Theatre (1975), and as the Stage Manager in Williamstown (1976). She played Felicity, a dying hospice resident, in ‘The shadow box’ (1977), the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning drama by Michael Cristofer, which opened at the Long Wharf, then transferred to Broadway’s Morosco Theatre. While concentrating on stage direction (both plays and musicals) in the 1980s, she acted in ‘I can’t remember anything’, the opening play in Arthur Miller’s diptych ‘Danger: memory!’ (1987).
Believing that theatre and other arts should be purged of elitism and accessible to all sectors of society, Fitzgerald was actively involved with public arts programmes, and served on the arts councils of New York city and state. Amid the social and political convulsions of the period, in 1969 she co-founded Everyman, a community theatre company that produced plays in deprived areas of the city, often with amateur casts recruited locally; she wrote, acted, and directed for the company, and helped initiate the inaugural Everyman Community Street Theater Festival at Lincoln Center (1971). For her work with Everyman, Fitzgerald was awarded the Handel Medallion by the city of New York, the municipality’s highest cultural award, the first actress so honoured (1973).
On the basis of two off-Broadway productions, Fitzgerald won the 1981 Outer Critics Circle’s Lucille Lortel award for outstanding new director: for ‘Mass appeal’ (1980), a dramatic comedy about the conflicts between an aging, genial, but complacent, parish priest (Milo O’Shea), and a radical, firebrand seminarian (Eric Roberts); and for an Everyman production of ‘Long day’s journey into night’, with an all-black cast (1981). She returned to Dublin to direct the European premiere of ‘Mass appeal’ in the Olympia Theatre, starring Niall Tóibín and Barry Lynch (summer 1981), then directed the play on a successful Broadway run (1981–2), with O’Shea and Michael O’Keefe; one of the first women to direct on Broadway, she received both Tony and Drama Desk nominations for best director. (In 1982, another play with a catholic religious theme, ‘Agnes of God’, began a lengthy Broadway run, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the first occasion ever that a mother and son were directing separate Broadway plays at the same time.) She wrote the lyrics and book, and directed an off-Broadway production of ‘Sharon’ (1993), a musical based on the play ‘Sharon’s grave’ by John B. Keane.
BIG SCREEN, SMALL SCREEN AND SONG
Fitzgerald’s versatility was evident in the varied character roles that she played in film and television. She was a goading, socially ambitious small-town attorney’s wife in Ten North Frederick (1958), opposite Gary Cooper; a widowed social worker who seeks to befriend a lonely concentration-camp survivor (Rod Steiger) in The pawnbroker (1964; dir. Sidney Lumet); a crazed revivalist preacher in Rachel, Rachel (1968), supporting the Golden Globe-winning Joanne Woodward in Paul Newman’s directorial debut; and the fetching but memory-impaired old flame rediscovered by a displaced pensioner (the Oscar-winning Art Carney) during his cross-country travels in Harry and Tonto (1974; dir. Paul Mazursky). She received a best actress nomination from the Australian Film Institute for The mango tree (1977), and played the harebrained, sherry-tippling, billionaire grandmother of the title character (Dudley Moore) in the hit comedy Arthur (1981), with Liza Minnelli, and in the ill-received sequel, Arthur II: on the rocks (1988), her last feature film.
Her television work included a worthy adaptation of The moon and sixpence (1959), from the novel by Somerset Maugham, playing the abandoned bourgeois wife of a Gauguin-like stockbroker-turned-artist (Laurence Olivier), with Cyril Cusack, Denholm Elliott, and Jessica Tandy. She made guest appearances in such television series as Naked city, The nurses, The defenders, Lou Grant, Trapper John, M. D., Cagney and Lacey and St Elsewhere. For her performance in ‘Rodeo Red and the runaway’ (1978) in the after-school series NBC special treat, she won a 1979 Daytime Emmy award for outstanding individual achievement by a performer in children’s programming. She played the redoubtable matriarch Rose Kennedy, opposite E. G. Marshall as Joseph Kennedy, and supporting Martin Sheen in the title role, in the award-winning television mini-series Kennedy (1983). She twice guested, in separate roles, on The golden girls, her first appearance (1988) receiving a Primetime Emmy nomination for outstanding guest performer in a comedy series.
After taking singing lessons in her mid fifties, Fitzgerald began singing in nightclubs and Everyman stage productions, and played the part of Jenny in ‘The threepenny opera’ (1972). For many years she toured in a full-length, one-woman cabaret show, ‘Streetsongs’, incorporating songs and connecting narration; during a lengthy off-Broadway run in 1979 the show was televised by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Her repertory of ‘winning songs, where the person transcends the bad moment’, performed in a deep, gravelly, ‘honey on sandpaper’ voice, (Irish Times, 23 July 2005), and notable for novel interpretations, ranged among Irish popular ballads, music hall and Tin Pan Alley standards, Percy French, Noel Coward, Vera Lynn, Edith Piaf and The Beatles. A live recording of a 1981 performance at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival, Cleveland, Ohio, was released as an LP, Geraldine Fitzgerald in Streetsongs (1983).
A consistently compelling performer of great authenticity and distinctive presence, Fitzgerald was witty, forthright, idealistic and intelligent. Standing 5ft 3in (1.6m) in height, she possessed a ‘cerebral beauty’ (Washington Post, 20 July 2005). She is honoured by a pavement star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease from the mid 1990s, she died at her home 17 July 2005, and was buried in Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx. Relatives in the theatrical profession include the Irish stage director Caroline Fitzgerald (niece), Irish actress Susan Fitzgerald, and British actress Tara Fitzgerald (grand-niece).