Frankly 63, Gray-haired Actress Geraldine Fitzgerald Eases Into Mother, Even Grandmother Roles
The stage, she says, has always been kind to her
The Washington Star, May 26, 1978: Nobody can accuse Geraldine Fitzgerald of being vain. She’s frankly 63, a fact her face immediately discloses. Her teeth, large and uneven, are discolored from a lifetime of smoking. She wears her gray hair swept back off her forehead and streaming down her shoulders in a style that, on anyone else, would indicate a person’s being out of touch with time and with herself.
Fitzgerald is neither. She is an original. A vivacious, confident woman. She tells you that at the center of her stage work is communication and five minutes in her presence makes that clear. Her hazel eyes register every nuance and she speaks in an unforgettable voice which is slightly pebbly, low in register but lifted with an Irish lilt she’s never completely lost.
The Dublin-born stage star still brightens the late, late television screen with her Hollywood salad-day roles, the most famous of which were in “Dark Victory,” with Bette Davis, in Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine” and in “Wuthering Heights,” which starred Lawrence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Olivier, who saw the picture again in 1976, is reported as saying, “You know, it was a bloody awful film. Geraldine Fitzgerald is the only thing that still holds up in that one.”
That pleases Fitzgerald, who considers Olivier to be “the greatest actor of the 20th century. He takes all sorts of chances. When he performs, he risks his whole past. But he tries to create what is the truth for him.” Fitzgerald’s acting life has also been a series of risks and strivings for the truth. She calculates she’s had at least four careers. “About 20 years ago I came to the conclusion that if you’re willing to start at the bottom, there’s nothing to fear. So you can start again, every time it all collapses under you.” She came back to the stage a decade ago, at 53, after a hiatus to raise her daughter, Susan Scheftel, now 26. Fitzgerald considered herself “extraordinarily lucky” to be able to look her age. “You see,” she explains, “the public hadn’t seen me for a long time, so it didn’t care that I’d aged.”
Fitzgerald does not, like others she knows, have to keep up the appearance of a pretty Irish Colleen through “hair coloring and surgery.” She often refers to her roles as those of “the old woman.” One example is her role as Mme. Pernelle, a mother and grandmother in the PBS’ Great Performances production of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” She was rushed into the show at the last minute when Mildred Dunnock, a friend who was to play the role, became ill. Fitzgerald hasn’t seen the production yet and she fervently hopes she was funny. “I’m supposed to set the humorous tone,” she says anxiously.
As Fitzgerald has grown in stature, her risks, like Olivier’s, have grown. Since her girlhood in Dublin, Fitzgerald had always wanted to be a singer. But then, as now, “people who loved me discouraged me. They said I had a horrible voice.” While she isn’t in the mood to demonstrate, she admits that she has “a very strange-sounding voice. A bit like, but not quite as harsh as, Bob Dylan’s.”
But that hasn’t stopped her. She recently developed a one-person show, “Songs of the Street,” which she performs in museums, on museum steps, in discos, anywhere she can. She packs them in — and, more important to her, she reaches people. “When you’re an actor you’re very often creating an illusion in a world the audience may watch, but when you’re doing a one-person show you are doing it directly to them, and they become part of it. You look straight into their faces and they, then, are the people in your songs.”
The songs are “about feelings and they have a sort of exultant resolution. To sing any other kinds of songs would make them too unhappy.” Some of the songs are from “Annie,” some are Beatles hits. She’ll sing “Danny Boy” on request, but she considers it too sad. She wants people to leave buoyed up and singing in the streets.
Hollywood was probably Fitzgerald’s third career. First, there was her stage debut at the Dublin Gate Theater, in 1932. Then, after a couple of years in English movies, she married her first husband, Edward Lindsay-Hogg, and “retired.” During a trip to America, however, she landed a radio part in an Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater production of Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House.” That marked the beginning of her second career.
Fitzgerald spent a year at Mercury Theater where she was “tremendously happy. It was just what I was looking for.” But Hollywood beckoned with bags full of money. Not only Fitzgerald, but Welles, John Houseman and other members of the Mercury Theater cast were beckoned. “We all left,” she says with a regretful sigh.
“I couldn’t understand Hollywood, really. I was interested in the performing arts and they were interested, because they have to be, in the commercial aspects. I thought they were blind to the artistic choices.” After a few years, her film career and her marriage ended. Her son from that marriage is Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a British television (“Professional Foul”) and movie director. Fitzgerald married New York businessman, Stuart Scheftel in 1946.
Since her reemergance at full maturity, Fitzgerald has had an actor’s dream (she has always called herself an actor) of mother roles. Her favorite (because of both the role and the playwright) was the drug-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which she played at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn. where she has been a member of the ensemble. She was also the mother — this one wholesome and exuberant — in O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” And in Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock,” her Irish accent, always near the surface, served her well.
“I can really put it on if I need to on the stage,” she says, putting it on and smiling mischievously. It was inevitable that Fitzgerald would also get the plummy role of the Southern-belle mother in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” presented in 1976 at the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia. Most recently, Fitzgerald and Jason Robards Jr. played Washington and Broadway in O’Neill’s “Touch of the Poet.”
She was in Washington the other day to play still another “mother” role, “Mother” Mary Jones, who was active in the labor movement. The “theater” was the White House for Rosalynn Carter’s Senate wives luncheon. Fitzgerald, along with Carol Kane and Maureen Anderman, performed excerpts from a drama based on Eve Merriam’s book, “Growing Up Female in America: Ten Lives.”
Fitzgerald’s movie days are far from over, however. She is featured in two new productions, both entries in the Cannes Film Festival. One is an Australian movie, “The Mango Tree,” and the other, “Bye, Bye Monkey,” is an Italian entry by director Marco Ferari (“an artist of great distinction with a most unusual view of life”) and also starring Marcello Mastroianni, James Coco and Gerald Depardieu.
The movie is primarily in English and Ferari took his international cast to New York’s Battery to make it. “It’s about the survival of love in a dying city,” explains Fitzgerald, who plays a lonely old widow who has a brief, but important love affair with a young man (Depardieu). “It’s a very tender film for a man (Ferari) who is often known for the savagery of his point of view.”
Fitzgerald’s life revolves around her work and her family. She’s proud of her husband, who she says “introduced President Carter to New York” with a reception in their East Side apartment. “This was before anyone knew who President Carter was,” says Fitzgerald, who plans to put a plaque on their small red Franklin stove before which Carter stood to speak to the assemblage.
Her son, Michael, dates Jean Marsh (Rose in “Upstairs, Downstairs whom she calls “very amusing, charming and clever”) and he is divorced from Lucy Davis, daughter of Irish tweed manufacturer Donald Davis. Lucy is the woman Lord Snowdon will probably marry now that he’s divorced from Princess Margaret. Daughter Susan, who is studying for a master’s degree in psychiatric social work at the City College of New York, has been working with emotionally disturbed children for several years.
In all, Geraldine Fitzgerald is a happy, fulfilled woman. The stage is an occupation that has always been open to women. And to her, she says, it has been kind.
Originally published as: Geraldine Fitzgerald, the original
