Geraldine Fitzgerald Dies at 91
Geraldine Fitzgerald, the Irish-born actress and director whose career spanned nearly 70 years, died of a respiratory infection on July 17 at the age of 91 in New York City. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade.
She made her Broadway debut in 1938, playing Ellie Dunn in Orson Welles’ production of Heartbreak House. Her other Main Stem credits included the short-lived plays Sons and Soldiers (which co-starred a young Gregory Peck) and Hide and Seek, as well as Arvin Brown’s 1975 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!. In 1977, she appeared on Broadway in both the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Shadow Box and a revival of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet with Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst.
Fitzgerald received high praise for her performance as Mary Tyrone in a 1971 Off-Broadway production of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night that co-starred Robert Ryan, Stacy Keach, and James Naughton. In 1981, she directed an African-American production of that play for the Public Theater with Earle Hyman, Gloria Foster, Al Freeman Jr., and Peter Francis James in the cast. In 1980, she directed the Off-Broadway production of Bill C. Davis’ play Mass Appeal and continued to helm the show when it moved to Broadway in 1982, earning Fitzgerald a Tony Award nomination. In 1993, she directed and wrote the musical Sharon, which had a brief run at Playhouse 91.
Additionally, Fitzgerald founded in 1969 a theater company called the Everyman Street Theater, which brought theater to depressed sections of New York City. She also created a cabaret act, Streetsongs, that played on Broadway in 1976. But the actress spent much of her career in Hollywood, where she amassed an impressive list of film credits including Dark Victory, Watch on the Rhine, The Pawnbroker, Rachel, Rachel, and Arthur. Her most famous role was Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights (1939), which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Fitzgerald was married twice — to the playwright Edward Lindsay-Hogg, whom she divorced, and subsequently to Stuart Scheftel, who died in 1994. She is survived by one child from each marriage: the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and her daughter Susan, a psychologist.
