As a teenager, I lived a few doors from Micheál Mac Liammóir in Harcourt Terrace in Dublin and used to see him walking up and down, reciting his lines. I didn’t know it then, but he had made his film debut as a child actor in Knocknagow, an Irish classic of the silent period, adapted from Charles Kickham’s popular novel and released just over a 100 years ago by the Film Company of Ireland.
This first indigenous film company in Ireland was founded by my grandparents, Ellen O’Mara Sullivan and James Mark Sullivan.
My grandfather’s role is well documented, but my grandmother’s participation has been overlooked until recently.
Ellen O’Mara Sullivan, also known as Nell, was born in Limerick in 1882, and grew up in Hartstonge House, beside Leamy School made famous by Frank McCourt. I never knew her, but photographs show a dark, slim, short-sighted young woman, dressed in Victorian clothes. Her father was a prominent Limerick merchant and had been member of Parnell’s Parliamentary Party, as well as mayor of his native city. In 1910 Nell married Irish-American James Mark Sullivan, when she was 28 and he 40.
Reel-life pioneer – Mary Rose Callaghan on Ellen O’Mara Sullivan, a trailblazer of Irish cinema
Sound reasons – Colm Keena on music and meaning
‘An old man in a hurry’ – John Mulqueen on Seán Lemass
Trial by Drury – Frank McNally on how a small Dublin street became a flashpoint for debate on the city’s future
James Mark, born in 1870, had been carried as a child from Kerry to Connecticut. He worked as a journalist first and then became a prominent New York lawyer and later a diplomat. But this job didn’t suit his larger-than- life temperament and around 1914 the couple returned to Dublin, setting up house at 43 Pembroke Road, Dublin, with their two young sons.
The film company was founded with Henry Fitzgibbon, a banker. My two grandparents and Fitzgibbon, were co-directors, but my grandmother, as an heiress, was the main investor. The office was in Dame Street and the company hired Abbey and independent actors, also directors Fred O’Donovan and John McDonagh. Their films aimed to promote the cause of Irish freedom.
By 1916 they had made about 10 shorts, with names like Fun at Finglas Fair, most of which perished in the Easter Rising when a fire broke out in the company’s office.
Undaunted, my grandparents released Knocknagow two years later.
I met Cyril Cusack in the 1980s in Leeson Street, when he reminisced about my grandfather and described his own debut as a child actor in Knocknagow. He told me his tears were real in the film, because during the production he accidentally sat on nettles.
In 1918, Nell travelled to America with her husband to work on promotion. The US copyright of Knocknagow is in Nell’s name, and, while it’s true that, at the time, the main investor owned a film’s copyright, some scholars believe she may have also adapted the screenplay.
The script is credited to a mysterious “Ulster novelist”, Mrs N. F. Patton, whom no scholar has ever been able to identify, so some academics think this could have been a pseudonym.
In 1919, Nell caught typhoid from nursing her eldest son, Donal, who died of it, aged eight. She was only 36 when she followed her son. My grandfather, refusing to go back to Pembroke Road, moved to 4 Palmerston Park in Dublin with his three surviving children.
In 1920 Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn, was released, also the Dáil Bonds Film, a propaganda short. Nell had worked on both these films. The credits movingly acknowledge they were “made by Irish men and women”, reminiscent of the wording of the Irish Proclamation.
With Nell gone, the film company folded in 1922. My grandfather took his family back to America and resumed work as a lawyer, dying in Florida in the mid-1930s.
Today, I often stop outside 43 Pembroke Road.
A big chestnut tree grows in the front garden.
It must have been there in 1919, along with a stone eagle over the hall door which still guards the house, but couldn’t keep fate at bay.
Nell did not live to see the success of her films, but there is some consolation in art. Today the films are having an after-life. Knocknagow is recognised as a silent classic. And in 2013 Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn toured Berlin, Paris and Madrid, with a new music score by Bernard Reilly, as part of a culture programme to celebrate Ireland’s presidency of the European Union.
Today the Irish film industry is winning prizes on all fronts. This is wonderful, but we shouldn’t forget the pioneers who had the courage and foresight to recognise a great new art form.
Among them was a Limerick woman, my grandmother.