seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Aldwych Theatre


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Birth of Eileen Crowe, Stage & Film Actress

Eileen Aice Izabella Crowe, Irish actress, is born at Carlingford Terrace in Drumcondra, Dublin, on March 2, 1899.

Born Alice Izabella, she is one of ten children born to grocer Moses Crowe and Therese Eglinton. From an early age, she shows an interest in the theatre, and regularly attends productions in both the Gaiety and Abbey theatres. Having completed her education, she joins a convent but soon after abandons the idea of becoming a nun. In October 1921, she enters the Abbey School of Acting. She has a career with the Abbey Theatre from 1921 to 1970.

Upon her entry to the Abbey School of Acting, Crowe makes her debut in 1921 in the play The Revolutionist, taking the lead role of Nora Mangan. She plays her last role of Miss Hatty in Grogan and the Ferret, after which she retires. During nearly five decades, she stars in many plays, some of which include The Marriage of Columbine (1921) and Juno and the Paycock (1924). Between 1931 and 1953, she appears in the Abbey Theatre productions of plays by Irish playwright Teresa Deevy including A Disciple (1931), Katie Roche (1936, 1937, 1949, 1953), Temporal Powers (1932, 1937) and The Reapers (1930).

Following her film debut in 1925 in The Land of Her Fathers, Crowe appears in many films between 1936 and 1964 including The Plough and the Stars (1937), The Quiet Man (1952), Home is the Hero (1959) and Girl with Green Eyes (1964), her last film appearance.

Also in 1964, Crowe appears in the Aldwych Theatre‘s production of Juno and the Paycock in London. She works in the Abbey for the vast majority of her career, except for when she is on a six-month tour for Peg O’ My Heart, touring Northern Ireland and England.

In 1924, when the play Grasshopper is being produced, Crowe meets her husband, Peter Judge, also known as F. J. McCormick. They are married in 1925 and the marriage produces a daughter and a son.

Crowe dies at her home in Upper Rathmines Road, Dublin, on May 8, 1978, at the age of 79. She is buried beside her husband in Dean’s Grange Cemetery in Deansgrange, Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, County Dublin.


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Birth of Actress Valerie Hobson

valerie-hobson

Valerie Hobson, Irish-born actress who appears in a number of films during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, is born Babette Valerie Louise Hobson in Larne, County Antrim, Northern Ireland on April 14, 1917. Her second husband is John Profumo, 5th Baron Profumo, a government minister who becomes the subject of a sensational sex scandal in 1963.

In 1935, still in her teens, Hobson appears as Baroness Frankenstein in Bride of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff and Colin Clive. She plays opposite Henry Hull that same year in Werewolf of London, the first Hollywood werewolf film. The latter half of the 1940s sees Hobson in perhaps her two most memorable roles: as the adult Estella in David Lean‘s adaptation of Great Expectations (1946), and as the refined and virtuous Edith D’Ascoyne in the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

In 1952 she divorces her first husband, film producer Sir Anthony Havelock-Allan. In 1954, she marries Brigadier John, 5th Baron Profumo, an MP, giving up acting shortly afterwards. Baron Profumo is a prominent politician of Italian descent. Hobson’s last starring role is in the original London production of Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s musical play The King and I, which opens at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on October 8, 1953. She plays Mrs. Anna Leonowens opposite Herbert Lom‘s King. The show runs for 926 performances.

After Profumo’s ministerial career ends in disgrace in 1963, following revelations he had lied to the House of Commons about his affair with Christine Keeler, Hobson stands by him. They worked together for charity for the remainder of her life, though she does miss their more public personas.

Hobson’s eldest son, Simon Anthony Clerveaux Havelock-Allan, is born in May 1944 with Down syndrome. Her middle child, Mark Havelock-Allan, is born on April 4, 1951, and becomes a judge. Her youngest child is the author David Profumo, who writes Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir (2006) about the scandal. In it, he writes his parents told him nothing of the scandal and that he learned of it from another boy at school.

Valerie Hobson dies on November 13, 1998, at the age of 81 at a Westminster, London Hospital following a heart attack. After her death, her body is cremated in accordance with her wishes. Half her ashes are interred in the family vault in Hersham. The rest are scattered on January 1, 1999, by her sons David Profumo and Mark Havelock-Allan, near the family’s farm in Scotland.

Hobson is portrayed by Deborah Grant in the film Scandal (1989), and by Joanna Riding in Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s stage musical Stephen Ward, which opens at the Aldwych Theatre on December 19, 2013.