Green pastures

Thomas Myler on Hollywood’s successful Irish

Peter O’Toole was nominated eight times for an Oscar and never won the statuette once, an all-time record?

Maureen O’Hara. Dubbed ‘The Queen of Technicolour, was a true Dub, born in Ranelagh and growing up in Milltown.

As Shakespeare himself could have put it, ‘There’s something rotten in the state of Los Angeles.’ How else can the peculiarities of the Academy Award people be explained when it is remembered that Peter O’Toole, a hell-raiser extraordinary but a fine actor, one of the best, was nominated eight times for an Oscar and never won the statuette once, an all-time record? His Best Actor nominations were Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Becket (1964), The Lion in Winter (1968), Goodbye Mr Chips (1969), The Ruling Class (1972), The Stunt Man (1980), My Favourite Year (1982) and Venus (2006). He was given an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 2002 but he always regarded that as a secondary prize. According to his daughter Kate in a new book Hollywood Irish, written by Dublin journalist Jason O’Toole, Peter was pressurised into accepting the award. ‘They forced one onto him,’ she says. ‘He said, “No, I don’t want one because it’s not in competition.” He turned it down. They said that was grand but they were giving it to him anyhow because they said they called the shots. They said if he didn’t turn up, it wasn’t going to look very good. ‘It was horrible,’ she recalled, shaking her head in disgust. Kate was unable to shed any light on the mystery of her father’s actual birthplace, Ireland or England. ‘He wasn’t even sure himself,’ she says. ‘In his own memoir, he said he had two birth certificates. One giving Connemara in Galway as the origin of birth and the other as Leeds. I was born in England and have an Irish birth certificate. I was registered with the Department of Foreign Births.’ Kate herself has a fine body of work, including roles in John Huston’s The Dead (1987), appearing in the Meryl Streep movie Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), alongside Ewen McGregor in Nora (2000) and starring alongside U2 drummer Larry Mullen in his film debut Man on the Train (2011). Whatever about Peter O’Toole, there was never any mystery concerning Maureen O’Hara. Dubbed ‘The Queen of Technicolour, she was a true Dub, born in Ranelagh and growing up in Milltown. ‘A chance meeting with a popular American singer named Harry Richman in the Gresham Hotel led to me being offered a screen test by Elstree Studios in London,’ she said in an interview at her home in Glengarriff in West Cork in 1990, shortly after she had turned 90.‘This led to me being offered a contract with the production company Mayflower Pictures owned by the Anglo-Irish actor Charles Laughton and Eric Pommer, the great movie producer. My first starring role was as Maureen FitzSimons, my real name, in a musical comedy My Irish Molly. 62 Senior Times l January - February 2020 l www.seniortimes.ie

‘But it was changed after Laughton cast me as his leading lady in Jamaica Inn in 1939, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, whose mother also happened to be an Irish woman.

‘It was Laughton who changed my name. He said ‘That surname would be horrible on a marquee’ and he changed it to Maureen O’Hara, much to my protest. ‘Take it or leave it,’ he said. That was it. After the success of Jamaica Inn, I was cast again alongside Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, my first American film.’

Maureen said that of all the actors she worked with, her closest bond was with John Wayne. They made five films together. ‘He was a wonderful person, and a wonderful person to work with,’ she said. ‘I was also close to the director John Ford. Ford’s real name was Sean Aloysius O’Fearna, which was John Martin Feeney in English. He was the youngest child of Irish immigrants from Spiddal in Galway. He was very proud of that.

‘One of my all-time favourite movies was The Quiet Man, with John Wayne and directed by John Ford. You’d be surprised how long it took to raise the money to make the movie.

We couldn’t get it anywhere. Before we made The Quiet Man, we made a movie called Rio Grande and when Republic Studios heard all the hullabaloo about the money problems to make The Quiet Man, they agreed to finance it.

Gabriel Byrne is also featured in the book. A born and bred Dubliner, he studied for the priesthood and was a teacher before going into acting

Featured in the book is Brenda Fricker, who has the distinction of being the first and only Irish actress to ever win an Oscar

We were thrilled.’

Maureen came out of retirement in 1991 to make Only the Lonely with John Candy. Sadly, he died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 43. ‘He was a charmer,’ she said. ‘He was coming to Ireland to play in my golf tournament and he had to go to Southern California to do a job and he died.'

‘We were all looking forward to him coming to Ireland. Can you imagine John Candy out on that golf course? He was a very, very nice person, a very strong Catholic. We used to meet after mass on Sundays with his wife, his kids and my relatives. We’d all go yakety yakety yak, and it was wonderful.’ Also featured in the book is Brenda Fricker, who has the distinction of being the first and only Irish actress to ever win an Oscar. She got the award for her portrayal of Christy Brown’s mother in Jim Sheridan’s powerful movie My Left Foot in 1989. She is best known to TV viewers for the hospital drama Casualty and the RTE urban soap Tolka Row.

‘I was born in the Liberties, a rough working-class district in the centre of Dublin, the youngest of two children,’ she told the author. ‘My mother Bida was a schoolteacher and my father Desmond was a journalist with the Irish Times before working in public relations. I originally wanted to be a writer but switched to acting when offered Tolka Row.’

However, the old adage about fame and fortune not being able to buy you happiness is certainly true when it comes to this self-described ‘reclusive’ and multifaceted woman. The startling truth is that Brenda was putting on a brave facade. Back in 2012, she stunned TV3 viewers when she revealed on a midday chat show that she had been suffering from crippling depression for 50 years. Things were so bad, she said she attempted suicide 32 times. ‘It was a mistake to say that,’ she says in the interview. ‘I might have done something very silly like cut myself, which would be just a cry for help. I don’t think they were serious attempted suicides. They were just screams for help and you just got tired of nobody hearing you that I just went and tried it for real. I would say that out of all off those, there might have been two or three serious suicide attempts.’ Happily she does not suffer from depression anymore. She did for 50 years until she found, in her own words, ‘a wonderful cure.’ Having tried every combination of medication and spending a fortune ‘that could have bought three houses on Leeson Street on psychiatrists,’ she found a place which had a treatment. On their advice, she listened to Mozart music for two hours every morning for a week for two months before having a break and then going back a month later for about a week or ten days. ‘You lie down during the treatment and go to sleep. Then you have three weeks or so off and you go back and you’re cured. Back in the old days you would call it a miracle. You see the world with clear eyes for the first time. You can walk down the street without being terrified. You can think clearly. I’ve sent about five people to them and they’ve all being cured. It’s quite extraordinary.’ Brenda lives a very secluded life these days, saying she feels elated as having retired from acting since doing a TV show in 2015. As she puts it in the interview, ‘I was always uncomfortable with fulfilling the annoying obligations that are part and parcel of being a movie star, whether it was promoting films on the red carpet at Cannes, going to events like the Oscars or conducting the many interviews they are always writing into movie stars’ contracts when they sign up to make a film. I found them very nerve-wracking.’ Gabriel Byrne is also featured in the book. A born and bred Dubliner, he studied for the priesthood and was a teacher before going into acting. He first made his name on television in the RTE soap The Riordans and the spin-off Bracken before branching into what has become a very successful movie career. ‘I lived in Hollywood and I thought I would make some really big Hollywood projects,’ he says, ‘which I did. I had a great time doing them. Then I moved to New York for family reasons. I have continued to work now in New York independently, in independent films. I never set out to have a career in films. I have always worked on the assumption that directors fascinate me because they are able to tell a story, and if I think I would like to be part of that story, well then I will go and do the picture with them. ‘As I get older, I think the idea of travelling is not so interesting to me anymore so I tend to stick around New York.’ Hollywood Irish: Interviews with Irish Movie Stars, is published by BearmanorMedia.Com. Check it out in major book stores. Senior Times l January - February 2020 l www.seniortimes.ie 63