Geraldine FitzGerald: Geraldine FitzGerald, who has died aged 91, was an Irish actress who might have become one of the glittering stars of Hollywood had she not adhered so strong-mindedly to the values of live theatre and allowed many cinematic opportunities to pass her by.
She said she "wrecked" her chances in Hollywood, but did not regret her decision.
She died in her home in Manhattan after a decade of Alzheimer's.
FitzGerald was born in Greystones, Co Wicklow, daughter of lawyer, Ned FitzGerald, and Brownie [ née Richards], on November 24th, 1913, and her entry into theatre came about by chance. In 1932, as a young woman bursting to tread the boards, she accompanied her aunt Shelah Richards, a distinguished actress, to a rehearsal of Blood and Sand at the Gate Theatre where Hilton Edwards, mistaking her for someone else, offered her a small part in the upcoming production.
Afterwards, she went to England to seek understudy work in theatre, but was spotted for minor roles in a couple of "quota quickie" films and, later, was well reviewed for more substantial performances in Turn of the Tide for Gaumont and The Mill on the Floss.
In 1937 she married Edward Lindsay-Hogg and went with him to New York, where he had business. Orson Welles, another Gate Theatre alumnus, had just started his Mer- cury Theatre with John Houseman, and he cast her in a production of Heartbreak House.
Hal Wallis, a major Hollywood producer, saw her and signed her to a standard seven-year Warner Brothers movie contract. however FitzGerald was sufficiently committed to the stage to demand a clause that would allow her to work in theatre for six months each year.
Her first Hollywood film role was in Dark Victory, as the more sober friend of vivacious socialite Bette Davis who, in a classic Warner's weepie, is going blind (the two women remained close friends during their film careers and afterwards; Davis always called her "Fitzy").
She then went on loan-out to Sam Goldwyn for the role of Isabelle Linton in Wuthering Heights opposite Laurence Olivier, a 1939 film which was his launch-pad to matinee-idol stardom. A British film critic once wrote that of all the actors in that film, only FitzGerald "looked as if she'd read the book". She was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for this, only her second Hollywood role, but she withdrew her name. She also turned down the female lead, subsequently taken by Mary Astor, in The Maltese Falcon.
She was regularly put on suspension for her refusal to kow-tow to studio demands.
Recalling Dark Victory, she said: "I didn't care for it, because it didn't have any kind of literary merit to my mind."
"I didn't have a hard time in Hollywood," she once told writer Carolyn Coman. "I gave myself a hard time . . . I wanted every script to be perfect, which is hopeless, because no one really can tell a good movie from a bad one in script form - it is so much a visual medium."
Her attitude directed her away from the prospect of Hollywood lights and back to her real love, the legitimate theatre. "My struggle to go back to the theatre got in the way of everything. Consequently I wrecked my chances in Hollywood, which were terrific," she would acknowledge much later.
In the following years there were a couple of roles which have a respectable place in cinematic history - the goading wife in Ten North Frederick and the lonely social worker opposite Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker - but FitzGerald's brightly promising movie career was effectively over by 1939. A performance as Woodrow Wilson's wife, Edith, in Wilson (1944) earned her a glamorous photograph on the cover of Life magazine.
It also attracted the attention of Stuart Scheftel, the grandson of Isador Straus, the co-owner of the R. H. Macy Co who went down with the Titanic. Scheftel asked a friend to introduce them, and they were married in 1946.
Back in New York she played opposite Gregory Peck in a production of Sons and Soldiers by Irwin Shaw, notable perhaps only because it was directed by Max Reinhardt in his last professional undertaking.
In the 1950s to the 1970s she appeared in productions of King Lear (with Welles in 1956); as Gertrude in Hamlet at Stratford, Connecticut; in Ah Wilderness at Ford's Theatre in Washington DC (1969); as Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, with Robert Ryan (1971); as Juno in O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock (1973) at the Long Wharf in New Haven (a favourite location); and opposite Jason Robards in A Touch of the Poet.
In 1977 she moved with a production of Michael Cristofer's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shadow Box from the Long Wharf to Broadway.
FitzGerald found fresh expression for her consistent view that theatre was an art for all by founding the Everyman street-theatre company, which took plays to the most deprived parts of New York City, using amateur casts drawn from the residents of the neighbourhood.
Out of that experiment grew a novel production, with an Everyman colleague, of Long Day's Journey with an all-black cast. It was later recorded for ABC television.
In her mid-50s, she started taking singing lessons. Her deep voice was once described as "honey on sandpaper" and she deployed it in her cabaret act, Street Songs, which she performed in many venues, including Joe Dowling's Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, and which was issued as an album. FitzGerald chose the repertoire - from the Beatles to Carrickfergus and Edith Piaf to Swanee - to be what she called "winning songs, where the person transcends the bad moment. People want life to be affirmed."
In 1981 she came to Dublin to direct Bill C. Davis's Mass Appeal, with Niall Tóibín and Barry Lynch. The play had been a huge Broadway success, with Milo O'Shea, and had won her her only Tony nomination.
Her first marriage to Edward Lindsay-Hogg produced a son, Michael, who is a film and television director. Her second was to Stewart Scheftel, with whom she had a daughter, Susan, a clinical psychologist in Manhattan, on whose Upper East Side she lived the rest of her life. She is also survived by two grandchildren and one stepgrandchild and by other family steeped in theatre, from writer Jennifer Johnston to actresses Tara FitzGerald and Susan FitzGerald, and director Caroline FitzGerald.
Geraldine FitzGerald, born November 24th, 1913; died 17th July, 2005