maureendelaney

The Auld Wan is back!

from National Library of Ireland on The Commons

• 3 older comments, and then…
• Suck Diesel said:

  “Maureen Barry O'Delany (1 December 1888 – 27 March 1961), professionally known as Maureen Delany and also billed as Maureen Delaney, was an Irish stage actress and screen actress of British films”
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Delany

• beachcomber australia said:

  Nickname was 'Daisy' according to - www.imdb.com/name/nm0216319/
  
  Evidently she over-acted - www.dib.ie/biography/delany-maureen-a9252 -
  ... Another part which Dublin theatregoers considered she made her own was the Widow Quin in ‘The playboy of the western world’ by J. M. Synge (qv). However, the critic Hugh Hunt (qv), assessing her career, noted that she played all her famous character parts in the same manner: ‘Large, warm-hearted, with a permanent twinkle in her eye . . . Maureen was not a great actress, but she was a superb performer. For over twenty years she was to play herself on the stage without varying her characterisation by a twitch of her eyebrow, to the utter delight of her public’ (Hunt, 118). The Dublin audience's appreciation probably prevented her development and froze her mannerisms; the American critic George Jean Nathan, writing on the Abbey's 1937 American tour, called the company ‘a caricature of its former self . . . [it] is obviously unable to control its fundamentally talented but personally over-cocky actress, Maureen Delany, and to prevent her from indulging in an outrageous overplaying, winking, snorting, and mugging that wreck any serious play she is in’ (Newsweek, 27 Dec. 1937). Her Times obituary noted that the Dublin audience often began to laugh even before she spoke. ...

• Suck Diesel said:

  youtu.be/A6lVN8niepA?si=r0TBjz5kPPx_Uyoq
  
  Reel 1 of 3

• Suck Diesel said:

  She first played this role in 1917, at the Abbey, of course
  
  www.abbeytheatre.ie/archives/production_detail/975/

• Suck Diesel said:

  I don’t see any performances of this play in 1933, but it was performed in 1934
  
  www.abbeytheatre.ie/archives/production_detail/2191/