Molly Allgood - Abbey actor, ‘player of genius’, Synge’s lover and muse

Mary (known as Molly) Allgood, whose stage name was Máire O’Neill, played the first Pegeen Mike in JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and was engaged to be married to the playwright. One of the most accomplished actors to emerge from that very talented first generation of Abbey performers, she died 70 years ago on November 2nd.

She was born on January 12th, 1887; her father George, son of a Protestant British army officer, was a printer and her mother, Margaret Harold, was a Catholic whose family owned a shop on the quays in Dublin. Of her seven siblings, her older sister Sara also became a well-known actor. When their father died in 1896, Molly was placed in a Protestant orphanage, from where she ran away and worked at various jobs such as dressmaking and in Switzers department store.

From 1930, she appeared in more than 20 Hollywood films

Around 1903, she and Sara enrolled in the drama classes of Maud Gonne’s nationalist organisation for women, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and their acting teacher, Willie Fay, then brought them into the Irish National Theatre Society which afterwards became the Abbey Theatre. Molly took the stage name “Máire O’Neill” to distinguish her from Sara. She took part in many of the Abbey’s early productions and Synge fell in love with her.

The relationship crossed class and sectarian barriers; their families (especially Synge’s) were strongly opposed, and Yeats and Lady Gregory at the Abbey disapproved of relationships between management and “staff”. But despite these obstacles and the added differences in age (he 36, she 20) and temperament (he cautious, she devil-may-care), their love endured and they became engaged, at first secretly. In this newspaper on September 23rd, 2019, George O’Brien refers to them acting out “their private, impassioned and exhaustive roles as star-crossed lovers”.

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He wrote The Playboy of the Western World for her and she played Pegeen Mike in the first, 1907 performances, which caused so much controversy and have gone down in Irish theatrical history as “the Playboy riots”. He also wrote Deirdre of the Sorrows, first performed in 1910, with her in mind. “Her acting and stage presence at this point in her career were such that she was said to be unforgettable, and her abilities contributed greatly to the internationally high reputation of the Abbey,” according to Linde Lunney, who wrote the entry on her in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Synge had an operation to remove neck glands in September and an inoperable tumour was found after further surgical investigations. He died in March 1909, aged 37. According to Ella Hassett (womensmuseumofireland.ie), he left Molly “a small income that would serve to help her in later financial difficulties, when the successes of her early career fell into decline”.

In 1911, she married GH Mair, drama critic of the Manchester Guardian, during a tour of the Playboy to London and the US. They had two children, significantly named John and Pegeen. Although she took part in occasional Abbey productions up to 1918, it was mainly with Liverpool repertory theatre and in London’s West End and in New York that she appeared. The death of her beloved brother Frank in the first World War in 1915 hit her hard and she turned to alcohol, on which she was to become increasingly dependent.

She acted mainly in Irish plays and became closely associated with Seán O’Casey’s dramas, participating, for example, in a six-month tour of Juno and the Paycock in Australia. On stage, she frequently accompanied her sister Sara, with whom she didn’t always see eye to eye, and Arthur Sinclair, a fellow actor from the early Abbey period. Mair died suddenly in January 1926 and she married Sinclair later that year but they divorced after five years.

From 1930, she appeared in more than 20 Hollywood films, mainly in small roles, perhaps most notably as Maisie Madigan in Alfred Hitchcock’s version of O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1930).

Further tragedy was to follow in her life when her son was killed in a plane crash in 1942 while training to be an RAF officer. Her later years were blighted by alcoholism and money worries. Her sister Sara, from whom she’d become estranged, died in September 1950. Molly died two years later of burns caused when she fell into the fire in her home in Radcliffe Square, London.

“All who saw her perform were greatly struck by her natural grace, her disciplined professionalism, and above all by her voice’s melodious range and resonance,” according to George O’Brien, and Yeats called her “a player of genius”.