Fitzgerald, Geraldine Mary

(b. 24 November 1913 near Dublin, Ireland; d. 17 July 2005 in New York City), actor, director, producer, and writer who, once her promising Hollywood career turned sour, triumphed on the American stage and television.

Fitzgerald was born in Greystones, County Wicklow, south of Dublin. She was the daughter of Edward Fitzgerald, a lawyer, and Edith Fitzgerald, a homemaker, and had two brothers and one sister. She attended a convent school in London, England, for her elementary education, followed by high school in Dublin. She had an early enthusiasm for art and attended Dublin Art School in 1928. Fitzgerald’s interest in acting happened almost by accident. One day she and an aunt went to Dublin’s Gate Theatre to watch a rehearsal. The director spotted her and confused her with another actor who was late. He handed her a script and told her to get on stage and read the lines. Inexperienced as she was, she so impressed him that he hired her immediately. She fell in love with acting as a career and relegated painting to a hobby.

Fitzgerald performed first at the Gate Theatre in 1932 in experimental plays. After a brief career on the Irish stage and in English movies she moved to New York City, where she debuted with Orson Welles’s famed Mercury Theatre in Heartbreak House on 29 April 1938. There she was discovered by the producer Hal Wallis, signed a contract with Warner Bros., and went to Hollywood. She achieved early success with Dark Victory (1939) and Wuthering Heights (1939), in which she appeared as Isabella Linton and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. But her movie career was thwarted by her battles with the studio bosses for better roles and six months off every year to pursue theater work.

From then on most of her films were forgettable, with a few exceptions such as the antifascist Watch on the Rhine (1943) and cult classics such as The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) and Three Strangers (1946). In Uncle Harry her character is incestuously attracted to her brother, but the brother falls in love and tries to get rid of Fitzgerald by poisoning her. Unfortunately the other sister drinks the poison and Fitzgerald is convicted of her murder. The movie censors changed the script so that Fitzgerald dreamed it, not realizing this kept the crime of incest in place. Fitzgerald was also proud of her work in Three Strangers, where she plays a woman so vicious that she butts out a cigarette on the back of her husband’s hand. The scene was so effective that a passerby on the street rebuked Fitzgerald for her cruelty. Another bit of business she used in this movie she learned from her costar, Peter Lorre, who had been a circus performer. Fitzgerald was required by the director to fall and land in a precise spot; Lorre told her to go to the spot first before falling. She did and landed precisely where the director wanted her to land.

In the mid-1940s Fitzgerald left Hollywood and moved back to New York City, where after a brief retirement she resumed her theatrical career in 1955 and achieved her greatest successes, although she occasionally returned to Hollywood to make a movie or appear in a television show. One of her greatest stage roles was as Mary Tyrone, the drug addict mother in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Fitzgerald was greatly praised for her interpretation in a 1971 off-Broadway production, where she played down Tyrone’s neurotic qualities and brought out her humor. The production’s cast and director earned the Vernon Rice Award. After taking singing lessons, Fitzgerald put together a program of “street songs,” a mixture of Irish ballads and songs by the Beatles and Kurt Weill. She performed these in nightclubs, cabarets, theaters, and eventually on television after her initial performance on 15 May 1974 at the Reno Sweeney nightclub in New York City.

Fitzgerald’s film and television appearances continued from the 1960s through the 1980s. She had parts in the popular movies such as Harry and Tonto (1974) and Arthur (1981) and earned acclaim for her occasional role in the hit 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls. Fitzgerald also branched out into directing, producing, and writing, primarily for the stage. As a producer and a writer she, along with Brother Jonathan Ringkamp, a Franciscan monk and fellow member of the New York City Council on the Arts, cowrote an adaptation of the old morality play Everyman called Everyman and Roach. The play was set to music and performed by neighborhood youth around the city in 1968. For her work with street theater Fitzgerald received the Mayor John V. Lindsay Award in 1969 and the Handel Medallion (New York City’s highest cultural honor) in 1973. She also received a Tony Award nomination in 1982 for directing Mass Appeal.

Fitzgerald’s first marriage was to Edward Lindsay-Hogg, an English aristocrat, songwriter, and horse breeder; they were wed on 18 November 1936. The couple had one son, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who became a television, motion picture, and stage director. In 1954 Fitzgerald became a U.S. citizen to show support for her adopted country. Fitzgerald and Lindsay-Hogg were divorced in 1946, and on 10 September 1946 she married Stuart Scheftel, a business executive. They had one daughter. After a ten-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Fitzgerald died of a related respiratory infection at age ninety-one. She is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx, New York City.

Fitzgerald was a witty and intelligent woman. Her incisive acting was enhanced by her stunning green-eyed, red-headed beauty, which lasted throughout her life. Many also remarked on her husky voice with its Irish lilt. Early in Fitzgerald’s career Orson Welles warned that success would come late for her. She begged him to “unsay it, unsay it,” but he proved to be prophetic. She may have been her biggest enemy by turning down Hollywood roles offered to her. She even rejected the part of Melanie in Gone with the Wind (1939). In later years she advised young actors to never say no. Despite her errors and disappointments, Fitzgerald earned an enduring monument in a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

There is no biography of Fitzgerald. Extensive quotations from her appear in Doug McClelland, Forties Film Talk: Oral Histories of Hollywood (1992). McClelland also wrote a long article on her that appeared in After Dark (Feb. 1976). Other articles are in the New York Times (1 June 1971) and Newsweek (22 Nov. 1976). An obituary is in the New York Times (19 July 2005).

Dorothy L. Moran