Samuel Lover, Irish songwriter, composer, novelist, and a painter of portraits, chiefly miniatures, dies on July 6, 1868. He was the grandfather of composer, cellist, and conductor Victor Herbert.
Lover is born at number 60 Grafton Street, Dublin and goes to school at Samuel Whyte’s at 79 Grafton Street, now home to Bewley’s, an Irish hot beverage company. By 1830 he is secretary of the Royal Hibernian Academy and lives at number 9 D’Olier Street. In 1835 he moves to London and begins composing music for a series of comic stage works. To some of them, like the operetta Il Paddy Whack in Italia (1841), he contributes both words and music, for others he merely contributes a few songs.
Lover produces a number of Irish songs, of which several – including The Angel’s Whisper, Molly Bawn, and The Four-leaved Shamrock – attain great popularity. He also writes novels, of which Rory O’Moore and Handy Andy are the best known, and short Irish sketches which, with his songs, he combines into a popular entertainment called Irish Nights or Irish Evenings. With the latter, he tours North America between 1846 and 1848. He joins with Charles Dickens in founding Bentley’s Magazine.
Lover’s grandson is composer Victor Herbert whose mother is Lover’s daughter Fanny. Irish-born and German-raised, Herbert is best known for his many successful musicals and operettas that premiere on Broadway. As a child he stays with the Lovers in a musical environment following the death of his father.
Poet, painter, novelist and composer, who, in the exercise of a genius as distinguished in its versatility as in its power, by his pen and pencil illustrated so happily the characteristics of the peasantry of his country that his name will ever be honourably identified with Ireland.
Shiels is born to Robert Shiels and Eileen (née MacSweeney). He emigrates to Canada as a young man. While working on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1913, he is involved in a serious accident that leaves him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He returns to Ballymoney and starts a shipping company with his brother and also begins writing. Starting with poems and short stories, he soon progresses to plays, which he provides to the Ulster Literary Theatre under the pen name of George S. Morsheils.
Starting with Bedmates (1921), his plays begin to be regularly accepted by the Abbey Theatre for production. His 1930 work The New Gossoon is so well-received that the Abbey’s touring company, The Abbey Theatre Irish Players, bring the play to Broadway for limited runs three times, in 1932, 1934, and 1937. In 1940, a production of Shiels’ The Rugged Path sets an Abbey record by attracting a total audience of 25,000 people over eight weeks.
When his success as a playwright allows him, he leaves the shipping business and moves to Carnlough on the coast of County Antrim, where he lives from 1932 until his death on September 19, 1949.
Bob Crowley, scenic and costume theatre designer and theatre director, is born in Cork, County Cork on June 10, 1952. He is the brother of director John Crowley.
Crowley has received multiple Tony Award nominations, and has won seven times, for designing the Broadway productions of Carousel (1994), Aida (2000), The History Boys (2006), Mary Poppins (2007), The Coast of Utopia (2007), Once (2012) and An American in Paris (2015). He receives three other Tony Award nominations in 2015, two for his costumes on The Audience and An American in Paris and one for his scenic designs for Skylight. He is a recipient of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Set Design and a three-time recipient of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design.
McKenna grows up in Galway, where her father is Professor of Mathematics at University College Galway, and in County Monaghan, speaking fluent Irish. She is still in her teens when she becomes a member of an amateur Gaelic theatre group and makes her stage debut at Galway’s Gaelic theatre, the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, in 1940.
McKenna is remembered for her English language performances at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin where she eventually stars in what many consider her finest role in the George Bernard Shaw play, Saint Joan.
While performing at the Abbey Theatre in the 1940s, she meets actor Denis O’Dea, whom she marries in 1946. Until 1970 they live in Richmond Street South, Dublin. They have one child, a son Donnacha O’Dea, who swims for Ireland at the 1968 Summer Olympics and later wins a World Series of Poker bracelet in 1998.
In 1947, McKenna makes her debut on the London stage in The Chalk Garden. She reprises the role on Broadway in 1955, for which she receives a Tony Award nomination for “Best Actress in a Leading Role, Drama.” In 1956, she appears in the Cambridge Drama Festival production of Saint Joan at the Off-BroadwayPhoenix Theatre. Theatre critic Elliot Norton calls her performance the finest portrayal of Joan of Arc in memory. Siobhán McKenna’s popularity earns her the cover of Life magazine. She receives a second Tony Best Actress nomination for her role in the 1958 play, The Rope Dancers, in which she stars with Art Carney and Joan Blondell.
Although primarily a stage actress, McKenna appears in a number of made-for-television films and dramas. She also appears in several motion pictures such as King of Kings in 1961, as the Virgin Mary. In 1964, she performs in Of Human Bondage and the following year in Doctor Zhivago. She also appears in the miniseries The Last Days of Pompeii as Fortunata, wife of Gaius, played by Laurence Olivier. She stars in the title role of the Tales of the Unexpected episode “The Landlady.”
McKenna is awarded the Gold Medal of the Éire Society of Boston, for having “significantly fulfilled the ideals of the Éire Society, in particular, spreading awareness of the cultural achievements of the Irish people.”
McKenna’s final stage appearance comes in the 1985 play Bailegangaire for the Druid Theatre Company. Despite surgery, she dies of lung cancer on November 16, 1986, in Dublin, at 63 years of age. She is buried at Rahoon Cemetery in County Galway.
Walter Macken, writer of short stories, novels and plays, is born at 18 St. Joseph’s Terrace in Galway, County Galway on May 3, 1915.
Macken’s father, Walter Macken, Sr., formerly a carpenter, joins the British Army in 1915 and is killed in March of the following year at St Eloi. The family therefore has to rely on lodgers and a small service pension to sustain them.
Macken attends the Presentation Convent for Infants from (1918-1921), St. Mary’s, a Diocesan College where they train people who want to become priests (1923-1924), and Patrician Brothers both Primary and Secondary (1921-1922 and 1924-1934), where he takes his Leaving Certificate. He is writing short stories, novels, and plays in exercise books from the age of eight and carries on these works well into his teens.
Macken is originally an actor, principally with the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe in Galway, where he meets his wife Peggy, and The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He also plays lead roles on Broadway in M. J. Molloy‘s The King of Friday’s Men and his own play Home Is the Hero. The success of his third book, Rain on the Wind, winner of the Literary Guild award in the United States, enables him to focus his energies on writing.
His son Ultan Macken is a well-known journalist in the print and broadcast media of Ireland, and wrote a biography of his father, Walter Macken: Dreams on Paper.
Walter Macken dies of heart failure at the age of 51 in Menlo, County Galway, on April 22, 1967.
The eldest of four sons, at the age of 12 MacNeven is sent by his uncle Baron MacNeven to receive his education abroad, for the penal laws render education impossible for Catholics in Ireland. This Baron MacNeven is William O’Kelly MacNeven, an Irish exile physician, who for his medical skill in her service has been created an Austrian noble by the Empress Maria Theresa. Young MacNeven makes his collegiate studies at Prague. His medical studies are made at Vienna where he is a pupil of Pestel and takes his degree in 1784. The same year he returns to Dublin to practise.
MacNeven becomes involved in the United Irishmen of the time, with such men as Lord Edward FitzGerald, Thomas Addis Emmet, and his brother Robert Emmet. He is arrested in March 1798, and confined in Kilmainham Gaol, and afterwards in Fort George, Scotland, until 1802, when he is liberated and exiled. In 1803, he is in Paris seeking an interview with Napoleon Bonaparte in order to obtain French troops for Ireland. Disappointed in his mission, MacNeven comes to America, landing at New York on July 4, 1805.
In 1807, MacNeven delivers a course of lectures on clinical medicine in the recently established College of Physicians and Surgeons. Here in 1808, he receives the appointment of professor of midwifery. In 1810, at the reorganization of the school, he becomes the professor of chemistry, and in 1816 is appointed in addition to the chair of materia medica. In 1826 with six of his colleagues, he resigns his professorship because of a misunderstanding with the New York Board of Regents and accepts the chair of materia medica in Rutgers Medical College, a branch of the New Jersey institution of that name, established in New York as a rival to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The school at once becomes popular because of its faculty, but after four years is closed by legislative enactment on account of interstate difficulties. The attempt to create a school independent of the regents results in a reorganization of the University of the State of New York.
MacNeven’s best known contribution to science is his “Exposition of the Atomic Theory” (New York, 1820), which is reprinted in the French Annales de Chimie. In 1821 he publishes with emendations an edition of Brande’s “Chemistry” (New York, 1829). Some of his purely literary works, his “Rambles through Switzerland” (Dublin, 1803), his “Pieces of Irish History” (New York, 1807), and his numerous political tracts attract wide attention. He is co-editor for many years of the “New York Medical and Philosophical Journal.”
William James MacNeven dies on July 13, 1841, at the age of 78 in New York City.
George Brent, Irish-born American stage, film, and television actor in American cinema, is born on March 15, 1904 in Ballinasloe, County Galway.
Brent was born George Patrick Nolan to John J. and Mary (née McGuinness) Nolan. His mother is a native of Clonfad, Moore, County Roscommon. During the Irish War of Independence, Brent is part of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He flees Ireland with a bounty set on his head by the British government, although he later claims only to have been a courier for guerrilla leader and tactician Michael Collins.
He eventually moves to Hollywood, and makes his first film, Under Suspicion, in 1930. Over the next two years, he appears in a number of minor films produced by Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox, before being signed to contract by Warner Bros. in 1932. He remains at Warner Bros. for the next 20 years, carving out a successful career as a top-flight leading man during the late 1930s and 1940s.
Brent drifts into “B” pictures from the late 1940s and retires from film in 1953. He continues to appear on television until 1960, having appeared on the religion anthology series, Crossroads. He is cast in the lead in the 1956 television series, Wire Service. In 1978, he makes one last film, the made-for-television production Born Again.
George Brent receives two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the first, at 1709 Vine St., for his film contributions, the second star, at 1614 Vine St., for his work in television.
Brent is married five times: Helen Louise Campbell (1925–1927), Ruth Chatterton (1932–1934), Constance Worth (1937), Ann Sheridan (1942–1943), and Janet Michaels (1947-1974). His final marriage to Janet Michaels, a former model and dress designer, lasts 27 years until her death in 1974. They have a son and a daughter.
Brent also carries on a lengthy relationship with his frequent Warner Bros. co-star, actress Bette Davis, who describes her last meeting with Brent after many years of estrangement. He is suffering from advanced emphysema, and she expresses great sadness at his ill health and deterioration. George Brent dies on May 26, 1979 in Solana Beach, California.
In December 1858, Roosa is arrested and jailed without trial until July 1859. He is charged with plotting a Fenian rising in 1865, put on trial for high treason, and sentenced to penal servitude for life due to previous convictions. He serves his time in Pentonville, Portland, and Chatham prisons in England.
After giving an understanding that he will not return to Ireland, Rossa is released as part of the Fenian Amnesty of 1870. Boarding the S.S. Cuba, he leaves for the United States with his friend John Devoy and three other exiles. Together they were dubbed “The Cuba Five.”
In 1885, Rossa is shot outside his office near Broadway by an Englishwoman, Yseult Dudley, but his wounds are not life-threatening. He is allowed to visit Ireland in 1894, and again in 1904. On the latter visit, he is made a “Freeman of the City of Cork.”
Rossa is seriously ill in his later years and is finally confined to a hospital bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Staten Island, where he dies at the age of 83 on June 29, 1915. His body is returned to Ireland for burial and a hero’s welcome. The funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery on August 1, 1915, is a huge affair, garnering substantial publicity for the Irish Volunteers and the IRB at time when a rebellion, later to emerge as the Easter Rising, is being actively planned. The graveside oration given by Patrick Pearse remains one of the most famous speeches of the Irish independence movement stirring his audience to a call to arms.
O’Sullivan is the daughter of Evangeline “Mary Eva” Lovatt and Charles Joseph O’Sullivan, an officer in the Connaught Rangers who serves in World War I. She attends a convent school in Dublin, then the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton, England. One of her classmates there is Vivian Mary Hartley, future Academy Award-winning actress Vivien Leigh. After attending finishing school in France, O’Sullivan returns to Dublin to work with the poor.
O’Sullivan’s film career begins when she meets motion picture director Frank Borzage, who is doing location filming on Song o’ My Heart for 20th Century Fox. He suggests she take a screen test, which she does, and wins a part in the movie, which stars Irish tenor John McCormack. She travels to the United States to complete the movie in Hollywood. O’Sullivan appears in six movies at Fox, then makes three more at other movie studios.
In 1932, she signs a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After several roles there and at other movie studios, she is chosen by Irving Thalberg to appear as Jane Parker in Tarzan the Ape Man, opposite co-star Johnny Weissmuller. She is one of the more popular ingenues at MGM throughout the 1930s and appears in a number of other productions with various stars. In all, O’Sullivan plays Jane in six features between 1932 and 1942.
She plays another Jane in Pride and Prejudice (1940) with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson and supports Ann Sothern in Maisie Was a Lady (1941). After appearing in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), O’Sullivan asks MGM to release her from her contract so she can care for her husband who has just left the Navy with typhoid. She retreats from show business, devoting her time to her family. In 1948, she re-appears on the screen in The Big Clock, directed by her husband for Paramount Pictures. She continues to appear occasionally in her husband’s movies and on television. However, by 1960 she believes she has permanently retired. In 1958, Farrow’s and O’Sullivan’s eldest son, Michael, dies in a plane crash in California.
Actor Pat O’Brien encourages her to take a part in summer stock, and the play A Roomful of Roses opens in 1961. That leads to another play, Never Too Late, in which she co-stars with Paul Ford in what is her Broadway debut. Shortly after it opens on Broadway, John Farrow dies of a heart attack. O’Sullivan sticks with acting after Farrow’s death. She is also an executive director of a bridal consulting service, Wediquette International. In June and July 1972, O’Sullivan is in Denver, Colorado, to star in the Elitch Theatre production of Butterflies are Free with Karen Grassle and Brandon deWilde. The show ends on July 1, 1972. Five days later, while still in Denver, deWilde is killed in a motor vehicle accident.
When her daughter, actress Mia Farrow, becomes involved with Woody Allen both professionally and romantically, she appears in Hannah and Her Sisters, playing Farrow’s mother. She has roles in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and the science fiction oddity Stranded (1987). Mia Farrow names one of her own sons Ronan O’Sullivan Farrow for her mother. In 1994, she appears with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers in Hart to Hart: Home Is Where the Hart Is, a feature-length made-for-TV movie with the wealthy husband-and-wife team from the popular weekly detective series Hart to Hart.
Maureen O’Sullivan dies in Scottsdale, Arizona, of complications from heart surgery on June 23, 1998, at the age of 87. O’Sullivan is buried at Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, Niskayuna, New York. She is survived by six of her children, 32 grandchildren, and 13 great-grandchildren. Michael, her oldest son, is killed at age 19 in a plane crash in 1958.
seamus dubhghaill 