Geraldine Mary Fitzgerald
1911 - 2005
Geraldine Fitzgerald was a great woman - and I am privileged to have known her, however slightly. Born in Dublin in 1911 (contrary to most of the newspaper obits), her father was a solicitor (that's a lawyer to you Yanks), whose law office figured in Joyce's Ulysses. Her aunt, Shelagh Richards, was an actress at the Abbey Theatre and, through her, Geraldine also became interested in theatre. (Shelagh was also, many years later, the patron of the theatre company that Sean and I founded in Dublin.) Anyway, Geraldine worked at both the Abbey and the Gate and, at the latter, met the young Orson Welles (who had finagled his way into the company by convincing its founders, Hilton Edwards and Micheal MacLiammoir, that he was a renowned actor in New York - where he had not, by that time, found any work). During a brief acting stint in London, where she also appeared in a couple of low-budget films (including The Mill on the Floss), she met and later married Edward Lindsay-Hogg and moved with him to New York.

There she hooked up with Welles again and appeared as Ellie Dunn in the Mercury Theater's production of Shaw's Heartbreak House. Welles, incidentally - and you won't see this in any of the obituaries - was also the father of her son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who later became a director himself (primarily for television, notably the Brideshead Revisited mini-series, though he also directed such films as The Beatles' Let It Be and the Watergate parody set in a convent, Nasty Habits).

Following Heartbreak House, Geraldine was signed with Warner Brothers, where her first role, as Isabella in Wuthering Heights, won her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She went on to appear in such films as Dark Victory, Watch on the Rhine, Wilson, Three Strangers, The Pawnbroker, and Rachel, Rachel. From the outset, though, she resisted the studio system and was constantly battling the powers-that-were at Warner Brothers - which is why she eventually pretty much turned her back on Hollywood. During this time, she also divorced Lindsay-Hogg and married Macy's heir, Stuart Scheftel, with whom she had a daughter, Susan (who later married - and divorced - Lord Snowden).

For some reason, the New York Times mentions the fact that Scheftel's grandfather died on the Titanic, so here's my own historical footnote: in 1970, the Weather Underground began building bombs as part of their abortive revolution. One of them went off prematurely, blowing up the Greenwich Village townhouse in which they were holed up, killing three Weathermen. The house was owned by Stuart Scheftel - though he had nothing to do with the Underground himself.

In the late Sixties, Geraldine founded the Everyman Company in New York with Brother Jonathan Ringcamp - and this is where Sean and I begin to owe her a debt of gratitude. The Everyman Company recruited young actors from working class neighborhoods in New York to perform in predominantly open-air productions (though they also eventually appeared in venues like Lincoln Center) and Sean, at the age of twelve, was chosen to be in one of the first companies. He worked with the Everyman for several years as an actor and director and, through Geraldine, gained great respect for accessible, populist, proletarian theater. More than that, though, she touched and ennobled the lives of every young actor with whom she worked - and, through them, showed audiences the way to a better, more harmonious future.

Geraldine was what is now almost an extinct beast: a progressive Republican. Before Nixon's Southern strategy, these were not really all that rare - and would include such politicians as Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, and John Lindsay, who, as mayor of New York at the time, was instrumental in helping establish the Everyman Company. Geraldine was a civil rights activist (as well as a very down-to-earth feminist at a time when feminism tended toward the shrill and strident) and part of the reasoning behind the Everyman was to create multi-ethnic companies of actors in each of New York's boroughs, using the arts to break down racial barriers, not only within the companies themselves, but through their performances. She made a profound impact on Sean and her "rough theatre" aesthetic influenced much of our later work together. Heh - I still use some of her warm-up exercises to relax.

In the Seventies, she returned to the stage as an actress, appearing in revivals of such plays as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (many still feel she was the definitive Mary Tyrone) and A Touch of the Poet, Ibsen's The Master Builder, and Williams' The Glass Menagerie. The first time I met her was when she was doing a one-woman show called Streetsongs. It was a sort of Irish cabaret and was both hilarious and deeply moving.

When Sean and I moved to Dublin, it so happened that Geraldine was also there to direct the world premiere of Mass Appeal (which, when it appeared on Broadway a year or so later, earned her a Tony nomination as Best Director). She asked Sean to be her assistant director - which, in the Dublin theater scene, was like instant credibility. Through Geraldine, we also met Michael Colgan, who was, at that time, the Director of the Dublin Theater Festival. He had Sean and I organize all of the Festival's street theater activities and, later, direct a couple of Fringe shows. It was also through having worked with Geraldine that we got to know Shelagh Richards, who was very helpful in getting our own theater company, Horizon, off the ground - a company that we successfully ran for about seven years. And it was through our work with Horizon that we later landed such jobs as Managing Director of Garter Lane Arts Center (Sean) and production designer for RTE, Ireland's national broadcasting network (me), as well as numerous additional acting, directing, and design gigs. In short, without Geraldine, it would have taken Sean and I years to establish ourselves in our new home - if ever - and we would certainly not have had the careers that kept us going for about eighteen years, enabling us, for example, to foster two sons.

In addition to continuing to direct for the theater, she also appeared in such films as Harry and Tonto, The Mango Tree, and Arthur in the Seventies and Eighties. But more than her stage and screen performances, I will always remember her for her generosity, her kindness, her humanity - her willingness to support young actors and promote equal rights, her dedication to a theatre for the people, rather than just an elitist, professional theatre-going crowd.

I last saw Geraldine in 1993 when she was in Dublin for the premiere of Brian Friel's Wonderful Tennessee at the Abbey. She was as bright and witty as ever - and every bit as fiesty as when she was battling studio heads in the forties. Not long after that, she began her descent into Alzheimer's. She will be sorely missed and we will always be grateful to her for the example she set with her life and work and the influence she had on the direction of our own.

As there were no funeral arrangements announced, Sean dropped a card and a dozen white roses at her Manhattan apartment last evening - and was pleased to be told by the doorman that there had been a stream of people stopping by all day.

Good night, Geraldine - may flights of angels sing you to your rest.

Tags: mourn not the dead
humour: sad