Adrian puts Irish stars of Hollywood centre stage

A native of St Louis, Missouri, Adrian Frazier always had a fascination with Irish literature and theatre. In school he was inspired by a teacher who had a particular fondness for Beckett, Synge and Yeats and he was involved in producing a number of Irish plays.

His passion carried through to university when he studied English at Pomona College in California. One of his lecturers was Professor Darcy O’Brien, who wrote a book on Joyce. The professor’s father was Hollywood silent film actor George O'Brien, the star actor for director John Ford in the 1920s.

“Darcy O’Brien knew John Ford and found him a frightening character. A lot of people thought he was the most brilliant director they had ever worked but there are not many stories where he sounds very cuddly,” grins Adrian.

A tiny seed must have been sown back then in the 70s in the impressionable undergrad.

Zoom forward four decades and Adrian is now a professor of English in NUI Galway and his fourth book has just been published. Hollywood Irish: John Ford, Abbey Actor and the Irish Revival in Hollywood focuses on Ford and the Abbey Theatre actors Ford championed, namely brothers Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur Shields, and Sara Allgood.

The Hollywood Irish is an absorbing read of an era which reached its climax with the success of The Quiet Man, one of greats of the golden age of cinema.

The book germinated from Adrian’s Masters programme in drama and theatre and an exploration of the acting style pioneered by the Abbey actors. But reviews of their performances gave little insight, so he began studying movies that many of the actors appeared in from the 1920s

It emerged that they brought “a humorous, crowd-pleasing style which was highly theatrical and full of showmanship”, explains Adrian. It was a style imitated by other established Hollywood actors.

When John Ford saw performances by the Abbey Theatre actors in the US during their long tours there he was enthralled. He approached his studio about importing the entire Abbey cast.

Ford came up with the idea of making a movie of one of the Abbey’s biggest repertory successes, Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, using the theatre’s entire cast. Plans were afoot to follow it with Juno and Paycock.

Fitzgerald, Shields and Allgood were willing to leave Dublin behind. As Protestants, they had eagerly joined the company at the turn of the 20th century, drawn to Ireland’s cultural political movement after watching a one-act play about Ireland, Cathleen Ní Houlihan. While that play was credited to WB Yeats, Adrian points out that Lady Gregory had a huge input into it.

However when the Irish Free State was founded, these Protestant artists found that the prevailing Catholic ethos made life uncomfortable, with a focus on the Irish language and on the sanctity of marriage. The Abbey was, after all, a company “rife with love-making”, by 1938, according to the author.

“Before the [Second World] War broke out, by bringing the Abbey starts to America, Ford imported the Irish Cultural Revival, especially as it was literally embodied in the performers of the plays of Sean O’Casey. The actors carried the [Irish] Revival’s heritage within their own expressive capacities. Their acts of self-expression were the means by which Ford often told his stories . . .,” Adrian writes.Readers with just a passing interest in Irish theatre and early American film will not fail to enjoy some of the book’s anecdotes about the actors.

Sara Allgood, who was later nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, received two marriage proposals, one from Abbey actor JM Kerrigan, who presented her with a wrist watch when asking for her hand. When he was spurned, he asked for the watch back and stamped it to bits on the floor of the Abbey Green Room.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.