Life
1887-1952 [stage name ‘Máire O’Neill’; var. Moira];
b. Dublin, 12 Jan.; sister of Sara Allgood; sent to an orphanage on father’s
death; apprenticed as dressmaker; joined Abbey in 1905; became engaged
to John Millington Synge, c.1905; played Pegeen Mike in The Playboy,
to riots in Dublin, Jan. 1907, had personal triumph with London performances
later that year; death of Synge, 24 March 1909; played lead role
in Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows, 1910; remained at Abbey
until 1911, returning occasionally until 1917; m. George Herbert Mair,
drama critic of Manchester Guardian, June 1911; widowed 3 Jan.
1926; m. Arthur Sinclair, 1926; divorced, 1954; played Liverpool Repertory
with J. B. Fagan; successful American tours included New York, often in
Irish plays, esp. Seán O’Casey, with her sister Sara and her
husband Sinclair (1883-1954); later years troubled by poverty and alcoholism;
a son died in an air crash in 1942; she died on 2 Nov. 1954; in his Nobel
Prize acceptance speech of 1923, W. B. Yeats, referred to her as ‘all
simplicity’; there is an oil portrait of 1913 by John Butler Yeats
in the Abbey Theatre foyer. DIB DIL FDA OXTH OCIL
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- Maurice Headlam, Irish Reminiscences (London: Robert Hale 1947), p.129-30 [infra];
- Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renascence (London: Secker & Warburg 1965); Do., (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979)
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Notes
Berg Collection of the New York Public Library
holds as part of the Lady Augusta Gregory Papers a document of contract
between Máire O’Neill and the Irish Literary Society (National
Theatre), signed by W. B. Yeats and Lennox Robinson and holding her to
performances on the American tour of 1911.
Maurice Headlam’s Irish Reminiscences (1947), pays a tribute to her acting (‘all but a really great actress’) and refers to her ‘voix d’or’, as ‘not a stage voice but full and pure and true, especially in the lower notes.’ (p.129-30.)
‘Peg of my heart’; Molly (“Maire”) O’Neill called her dg. Pegeen; her quarrels with Synge were of ‘Playboy-like fierceness’; part taken on by Sara in the 1920s; Brid Brennan plays the part in Garry Hynes’ production. In the National Theatre (London) production of 2001 Sorcha Cusack appeared as the Widow Quinn, Patrick O’Kane as Christy and Derbhle Crotty as Pegeen Mike (Notice by Nicholas Grene.)
Crossing boundaries: James Pethica writes, ‘[c]ontributing to and complicating this hostile trend, of course, was Synge’s relationship with Molly Allgood. Their liaison. as W. J. McCormack has observed, violated “boundaries of class, religion and age”’ at the Abbey; but it also violated the sharp line of authority Gregory and Yeats had sought to draw between Directors and actors. (‘“A Young Man’s Ghost”: Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge’, in Irish University Review, 34, 1, Spring/Summer 2004, p.14; for more, see infra.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)