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Life
| [stage name ‘Máire O’Neill’; var. Moira]; b. Dublin, 12 Jan. 1886 [var. 11], dg. of George Allgood, a British Army officer and printer, and Margaret [née] Harrol, a Catholic dg. of a shopkeeper on the quays; her sis. Sara (d.1949) also acted in the Abbey; her br. Frank died in the WWI, 1915; five other siblings; sent to an orphanage on father’s death, 1896; apprenticed as dressmaker; enrolled in Frank Fay’s Irish Lit. Theatre acting school, and joined the Abbey Th. in 1905; became engaged to John Millington Synge, c.1905 [aetats. 19 & 36]; played Pegeen Mike in The Playboy, to riots in Dublin, Jan. 1907, had a personal triumph with the London performances later that year; suffered the death of Synge, 24 March 1909, and denied permission to attend his funeral by his family; she played the lead role in his Deirdre of the Sorrows, 1910; received a small income in his will to ‘help her in later financial difficulties, when the successes of her early career fell into decline’; |
| stayed on wit the Abbey Company up to 1911; occasionally returned to act up with them to 1917; m. George Herbert Mair, drama critic of Manchester Guardian, and head of League of Nations office in London, June 1911 - with whom two children (John and Pegeen); widowed 3 Jan. 1926; deeply effected by the death of her br. Frank, 1915, and turned to alcohol; m. Arthur Sinclair [b. Frank McDonnell], 1926, ending in divorse within five years; 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); her later years were troubled by poverty and alcoholism; suffered the death of a son in an air-crash training for the RAF, 1942; died in Prewett Hosp., Basingstoke, with severe burns after a domestic fire, 2 Nov. 1952; |
| 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; her letters to Synge were returned to her after his death and have not survived; Joseph O’Connor has written a novel on their relationship recalled by her in the second person while living impecuniously in a London lodging-house very soon before her fatal domestic accident (Ghost Light, 2010); predeceased by Sara (d.1950), having earlier lost her husband and infant child to Spanish influeza); Sinclair predecessed her in 1951. DIB DIL FDA OXTH OCIL |
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Criticism
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).
See Maire O’Neill, ‘Synge and the Early Days of the Abbey’, in Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail (London: Macmillan 1988), pp.81-83; also George O’Brien, ‘Tramp and changeling: the love story of JM Synge and Molly Allgood’, in The Irish Times (23 Sept. 2019); Brian Maye, ’Molly Allgood - actor of genius - Synge’s lover and muse’, in The Irish Times (7 Nov. 2022) [A photo-port. by Berty Hardy shows Molly playing a tipsy Carrie Donovan in A Priest in the Family by Kieran Tunney (Nov. 1951) appears in both articles.
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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: In Irish Reminiscences (1947), Headlam 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.)
Joseph O’Connor: Molly Allgood is the subject of the novel Ghost Light by O’Connor which locates the first-person speaker in her lodgings preparing to record one of Synge’s plays on BBC and casting back her mind to previous episodes of her life. (See details on Ghost Life under Joe O’Connor - infra.)
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