Geraldine Mary Fitzgerald

Geraldine Fitzgerald (1913 - 2005). When Geraldine Fitzgerald directed her Tony-nominated production of Mass Appeal on Broadway in 1981, she explained: "I was forgotten, so I had nothing to live up to. It was the best thing in the circumstances. I could start at the bottom learning the new craft of directing." It was a modest statement from someone remembered by film fans as a 1940s Hollywood star, and by playgoers for some classical performances in the 1970s. Born in Dublin, the daughter of a prominent lawyer - his firm, E&T Fitzgerald, was mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses - Geraldine was educated at a convent school. Gifted in drawing, she persuaded her parents to enroll her at the Dublin School of Art, whose head suggested marriage as the next step. Her shocked response was to take up acting, so she went to her aunt, Shelagh Richards, whom she had seen perform at the Abbey Theatre, for coaching. Fitzgerald began her acting career at the Gate Theatre in 1932, where she met another aspiring beginner, the 17-year-old Orson Welles. He was infatuated by the fiery, auburn-haired beauty, six months his senior, and would later have a brief affair with her. She also bewitched Patrick Hamilton, who used her as the basis for the character of Neta in his 1941 novel, Hangover Square. In 1934, Fitzgerald began acting in low-budget British films, notably Turn Of The Tide, about two feuding fishing families. In 1936, she married Edward Lindsay-Hogg, a horse breeder, and after she appeared as an effective Maggie Tulliver in The Mill On The Floss (1937), they moved to New York. There, Welles gave Fitzgerald her American start, as Ellie Dunn in George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, with the 22-year-old Welles playing the octogenarian Captain Shotover, and a young Vincent Price as Hector Hushabye. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson found her showing nothing more than an ability to memorise lines; the producer, John Houseman, accused Welles of directing her with more indulgence than the rest of the cast. Despite this, Fitzgerald was offered the role of Isabella, to be seduced and abandoned by Laurence Olivier's Heathcliff in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939), for which she was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actress. On the strength of a sensitive performance, she got a contract with Warner Bros, for whom her first film was the classic weepy, Dark Victory (1939), in which she was touching as the devoted friend of dying Bette Davis. But Warner Bros failed to utilise Fitzgerald's undoubted talent, casting her instead as second female leads, notably again with Davis in Watch On The Rhine (1943), to which she brought beauty and conviction as Countess Marthe de Brancovis, the unhappy wife of Nazi agent George Coulouris. On loan to other studios, she was an upstanding US president's wife in the biopic Wilson (1944), her first col-our film; the jealous spinster sister of George Sanders in Uncle Harry (1945), on trial for the murder of his fiancée; and calm and intense as Alan Ladd's fellow spy in occupied France in OSS (1946). Her last two films for Warner Bros, both directed by Jean Negulesco, were Three Strangers (1945), in which she shared a sweepstake ticket with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and Nobody Lives Forever (1946), playing a rich widow swindled out of a fortune by John Garfield. Yet even these leading parts did not bring her satisfaction, and her film career faded as she lost her battle with the studio bosses for more suitable roles. It was disappointing, but Fitzgerald hardly needed the money, having divorced Lindsay-Hogg in 1946 and married Stuart Scheftel, the businessman and grandson of the founder of Macy's department store. In 1955, she returned to the theatre, taking up again with Shaw, as Jennifer Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma, and Welles, who cast her as Goneril to his King Lear in his ill-received production at the New York City Center. In 1961, she appeared off-Broadway in William Saroyan's one-woman play, The Cave Dwellers, under the direction of her 21-year-old son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg. She worked only spasmodically in the 1960s, her few films including Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) and Paul Newman's Rachel (1968), in which she played a revivalist preacher. But, in 1971, she made a triumphant comeback off-Broadway as Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted mother in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, winning a New York Critics' award. She continued to be very active in the 1970s and 80s, making an impression on stage as Aline Solness in Ibsen's The Master Builder, and as Amanda Winfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, as well as singing Irish folk songs in a one-woman cabaret show. Her screen performances included a moving old lady in Harry And Tonto (1974); a love scene with Gérard Depardieu in Bye Bye Monkey (1978); the role of a billionaire matriarch in Arthur (1981) and Arthur 2: On The Rocks (1988); a clairvoyant in Poltergeist II (1986); and the presidential matriarch Rose Kennedy on television in 1983. During the run of Fitzgerald's Mass Appeal, Michael Lindsay-Hogg's production of Agnes Of God opened, making it the first time that two directors, mother and son, had separate plays running on Broadway at the same time. Scheftel died in 1994; their daughter Susan survives her, along with Michael. · Geraldine Mary Fitzgerald, actor, born November 24 1913; died July 17 2005 Ronald Bergan in “The Guardian’.