The Allure of the Big Screen

Paul Harron discovers a recent book on Hollywood’s Irish connections published by Appletree Press.

LALA-Land’, ‘Tinseltown’, ‘Dream Factory of the World’ – just some of the names ranging from the derogatory to the infatuated coined for that famous stretch of land in the hills above Los Angeles synonymous with celebrity, hedonism and, of course, film-making. The big white cut-out letters which spell out Hollywood have become iconic, but in fact they originally spelt out the longer ‘Hollywoodland’ and were put there as a marketing ploy by an Irish American, John Roche, only later to be shortened to ‘Hollywood’, advertising not just a place but an industry and even a lifestyle.

Holywood’s associations with Irish men and women stretch back further and go deeper than that. In fact, the development of the place – and much of LA and its waterways – owes much to a pioneering Irish immigrant, William Mulholland, an engineer who is immortalised in the famous Mulholland Drive.

THE MOVIE MAKERS

As the authors of Emeralds in Tinseltown say, Mulholland prepared the way in the West for a new type of American adventurer who would follow railroads from the East: the movie makers. Many of these film folk were Irish and among them was a young man from County Meath called Owen Moore, Ireland’s first movie star and director. He starred alongside Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, for example, and went on to marry the actress Mary Pickford from whom he was later divorced – she went on to marry Douglas Fairbanks thereby becoming one half of ‘the king and queen of Hollywood’ partnership in the 1920s.

The Irish stars of Hollywood are described in fascinating detail by the authors, Steve Brennan – international editor of the entertainment daily The Hollywood Reporter – and Bernadette O’Neill – an Irish stage and screen actress, film historian and founder member of the IFTA. They take a roughly chronological approach, breaking the book up in chapters which are either thematically- or personality-based. Rex Ingram – originally Reginald Ingram Montgomery, the Dublin-born son of a clergyman – was one of the first to head across the Atlantic in the early twentieth century and take up directing, his first big box office hit for Universal being Black Orchids set in pre-Revolutionary France. He later went on to team up with Waterford-born Pat Powers, one of the founders of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company (later Universal Studios) and directed the renowned The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse starring Rudolph Valentino.

Other early Irish names were Cedric Gibbons, the Oscar-winning art director behind the MGM classic The Wizard of Oz, and other films such as Little Women, An American in Paris and Somebody Up There Likes Me. People ‘down here’ liked him too – as well as the Oscars he was awarded the award for distinguished achievement for art direction in 1950 by the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors.

Swashbucklers and stars of particular interest to Northern Irish film buffs, perhaps, is one of Hollywood’s most colourful Irishmen, Errol Flynn. Although actually born in Tasmania he like to be referred to as Irish when he was at the peak as the movies’ most infamous swashbuckler. His father Theodore Thompson Flynn was a popular professor of Zoology at Queen’s University, Belfast. Flynn, whose autobiography was entitled My Wicked, Wicked Ways (which just about says it all) shot to fame in Captian Blood in 1935 and went on to play action-hero roles in The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Dawn Patrol, Gentleman Jim and Against All Flags, which co-starred Maureen O’Hara and Anthony Quinn. Flynn finds himself in two chapters – one covering the Irish cowboys, another honing in on ‘Holywood’s glorified missus’, Greer Garson. Born in County Down, Garson was a reluctant émigré but was eventually attracted by the thought of the Californian sunshine adding ten years to her life (as Louis B. Meyer promised it would) and went on to become one of Holywood’s most enduring and respected stars (think, for example, Goodbye Mister Chips). She felt she was typecast as prim and proper and is pictured in the book battling the prim role in the embrace of Errol Flynn in the film That Forsythe Woman.

There are inevitably detailed and lively chapters on characters such as Gene Kelly, Maureen O’Sullivan and – ‘Holywood Screen Royalty’ – Maureen O’Hara and Grace Kelly. O’Hara – born Maureen FitzSimmons in Ranelagh, Dublin, in 1920 – went on to become particularly identified with the cult classic The Quiet Man, while Grace Kelly, the epitome of beauty on screen and star of film classics such as High Society and Hitchcock’s Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and Dial M for Murder, was the daughter of an Irish-American millionaire and of course went on to become real royalty through marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Her elegant features grace the cover of the book.

NEW GENERATIONS

Richard Harris’ life is covered well, from his early career and films such as This Sporting Life through to the acclaimed Jim Sherridan film The Field in which he played Bull McCabe. Harris had a reputation as a rebel, but thought that his epigraph should really read ‘he was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad’. His life story heralds the final chapters of the book marking the new generation of Irish-linked Holywood stars. These hot commodities include Colin Farrell, Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne and Roma Downey and directors Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan.

Emeralds in Tinseltown is an enjoyable book – one which can be easily dipped in and out of. There’s plenty of eye candy in the wealth of good archival photographs and film stills, and it’s attractively designed with nice little touches like the distinctive running images for each chapter. Anyone with an interest in films and Holywood and its Irish connections in particular will enjoy it. It’s not a definitive reference book (and it’s a slight shame that there’s no index) but it is packed with facts and interesting tit-bits that will please the film buff and those attracted to the glamour and allure of the big screen and its big stars down the years.

Emeralds in Tinseltown – the Irish in Holywood by Stephen Brennan and Bernadette O’Neill is published in hardback by Appletree Press (ISBN 978-1-84758-048-1) and widely available from local bookshops. For further information visit www.appletree.ie