Eugene O'Neill

Active - 1923 - 2008 | Genres - Drama

Biography by Bruce Eder

From the 1920s until the 1950s, Eugene O'Neill was regarded as the leading playwright in the United States, and in the English-speaking world. His works have regularly shown up in big- and small-screen adaptations, not only in the United States but in various countries around the world as well, reflecting the sheer breadth of his popularity and critical recognition in the early to mid-20th century. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in New York City in 1888, the son of James O'Neill, an actor, and the former Mary Ellen Quinlan. The elder O'Neill was a major star of the stage, and was especially renowned for his portrayal of the hero Edmond Dantes in Charles Fletcher's stage version of The Count of Monte Cristo, a role he played over 4,000 times. The part was too much of a good thing, essentially ruining him for anything more serious, and his life and career were blighted in later years by the awareness of a wasted talent. The young O'Neill grew up in a wretchedly unhappy home, enduring both his father's chronic disillusionment and his mother's addiction to morphine, which she'd been administered to help cope with the pain of one of her births. He was educated at various Catholic schools in a childhood that kept him traveling much of the time, and attended Princeton University until he was asked to leave.

O'Neill's early adult life was spent prospecting for gold in Central America, working various ships crossing the different oceans, and drinking a great deal of alcohol. His health deteriorated rapidly and suicide became an option that he considered, even as he pursued new career paths in journalism. There was also a failed marriage, the first of three in his life, which gave him two sons and a daughter. O'Neill ended up in a sanitarium at age 24, where he was cured of his most obvious illnesses and found a new focus for the direction of his life. While recovering, he immersed himself in the newest dramatic works coming out of Europe and was determined to become a playwright.

It was during the summer of 1916 in Provincetown, MA, when he was 28 years old, that O'Neill finally made contact with his muse, so to speak, while working in the company of writers such as John Reed and George Cram Cook. A staging of his early play Bound East for Cardiff proved a hugely inspiring event, and the result, upon their return to Greenwich Village, was the founding of the Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street. It was there, in the friendly yet fiercely competitive environment of the playhouse, that he went on to write his first string of successful drama, among them the one-act play The Long Voyage Home, the four-act piece Beyond the Horizon (which earned him his first Pulitzer Prize), and, later on, Anna Christie and The Emperor Jones. The latter, in particular, was so successful that it eventually was moved uptown to a large Broadway theater. It was the first modern play with a significant lead role for a black actor, and spawned far more than just its own success; growing out of that play's initial presentation in the Village, O'Neill's friend and collaborator Jasper Deeter went onto found the Hedgerow Theater, which became one of the most important regional theater companies in America. Anna Cristie won O'Neill his second Pulitzer in 1921, and a year later came The Hairy Ape, a fascinating character study.

Amid all of these early successes, O'Neill's family was involved in a tragic destructive cycle as his father and mother, and siblings, all succumbed to the consequences of their various psychological demons, so that by the mid-'20s he was the only survivor. Even as his parents and siblings were falling from the vine, however, O'Neill was writing and producing one of his most enduringly popular works, Desire Under the Elms (which turned Walter Huston into a stage star). He was rapidly entering his most productive and celebrated period as the 1920s wore on, exploring new psychological depths in his work in Strange Interlude (which got O'Neill his third Pulitzer) and Mourning Becomes Elektra, and also pursued more avant-garde work through a venture called The Experimental Theatre. His work also started appearing on film during the 1920s, with early versions of Anna Christie and Desire Under the Elms coming out of Europe. In 1930, however, MGM used Anna Christie as the vehicle to introduce Greta Garbo to the talkies, and in 1932 a film of Strange Interlude was forthcoming that was successful enough to get parodied by the Marx Brothers in one of their films, and a landmark production of The Emperor Jones, starring Paul Robeson, was released in 1933.

O'Neill's 1930s works, including the comedy Ah, Wilderness! (musicalized as Summer Holiday in 1948), proved successful on-stage and onscreen (filmed in 1935), but there were also overly ambitious, highly intellectual-oriented works that were failures in this decade. Part of the change in the nature of O'Neill's work grew out of its more personal nature during this period, as he started to use his plays to help sort out the various intellectual conflicts that he felt as a lapsed Catholic, among other personal issues in his life and the history of his family. Health problems, including complications from an appendicitis attack, interrupted O'Neill's career momentum during the second half of the 1930s and the early '40s, but he was able to bring forth the earliest manifestations of such challenging autobiographical works as The Iceman Cometh (1939/1946), Long Day's Journey into Night (1942/1958), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943/1947), and Hughie (1942/1964). All of these works featured characters and incidents that were obviously drawn from his own life and family, and secured his legacy as America's most gifted playwright of the early to mid-20th century.

On film, however, O'Neill's record of successes was spottier -- a 1935 movie of Ah, Wilderness! was a huge hit, and Walter Wanger produced a successful version of The Long Voyage Home, directed by John Ford, in the early '40s. Somewhat less successful (and undeservedly so) was The Hairy Ape starring William Bendix, and a 1947 adaptation of Mourning Becomes Elektra at RKO proved to be one of that studio's most notorious late-era failures. One other odd, unhappy connection between O'Neill's and the movie industry during this period was the marriage of his daughter Oona to Charles Chaplin, the screen legend, for which he never forgave her. On a business level, O'Neill's relationship with the screen was also less than a happy one -- he seemed to have an uncanny knack, in tandem with his business representatives, for taking flat fees for the film rights to plays that were later hit movies, while taking profit participation in the movie adaptations that generated only modest (or no) profits, and one could almost predict their fate by the degree of financial participation O'Neill had in the movie productions.

O'Neill's health deteriorated in the second half of the 1940s, and the failure of his play A Moon for the Misbegotten seemed an ignominious ending to his active career. He died at a low point in his popularity, after several years of inactivity, in a hotel in Boston in 1953, and, just as quickly, his reputation was resuscitated by a series of new productions of his plays, starting in Sweden and later in New York, and he received a posthumous fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night in 1958. The latter was filmed by Sidney Lumet soon after with an all-star cast, including Jason Robards Jr., Katharine Hepburn, and Sir Ralph Richardson, and along with a 1958 film of Desire Under the Elms, provided a good coda to O'Neill's screen career.

http://www.allmovie.com/artist/eugene-oneill-p53601

Eugene O`Neil, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered the greatest American playwright. No one, not Maxwell Anderson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, nor Edward Albee approaches O`Neil in terms of his artistic achievement or his impact on the American theater.

James O`Neil, one of the most popular actors of the late 19th century, was his father, so one could say that Eugene O`Neil was born to a life in the theater. His father, who had been born into poverty in Ireland before emigrating to the United States, developed his craft and became a star in the theaters of the Midwest. He married Ella Quinlan, the Irish-American daughter of a wealthy Cleveland businessman whose death when she was a teenager had hurt her emotionally. She remained emotionally fragile throughout her life, which was exacerbated by a further tragedy, the loss of a child. Her life was further exacerbated by the revelation that James had lived in concubinage with a common-law wife, who later sued him for child support and alimony, claiming he had fathered her child. Both were pious and believing Catholics.

They had three sons, including James Jr. (born 1878) and Edmund (1883), who died at the age of two from measles, leaving Ella distraught. Their last son, Eugne Glastone O`Neil (his middle name a salute to the British prime minister who was in favor of home rule for Ireland), was born at the Barrett Hotel (a home of many theatrical artistes) in New York City, on October 16, 1888. Supposedly, it was a difficult delivery, and in the spirit of the times, Ella was given morphine for her pain. She became an addict.

James O`Neil made a fortune playing The Count of Monte Cristo, both on Broadway in multiple productions and as a touring show. However, he suffered an artistic death as a performing artiste through the sheer repetition of the Monte Cristo role, which he turned to repeatedly as it always proved a success. He reportedly played the role more than 4,000 times, perhaps nearly twice that number. He would provide the prototype for the character of James Tyrone, the pater familias in his son`s Long Day`s Journey Into Night. James O`Neil, Sr. knew that he had suffered artistically from his commercial instincts, and Eugene O`Neil never forgot that. His son remained steadfast in his own fidelity to his principles of artistic integrity.

O`Neil pere also was a notorious skinflint, worried about some calamity that would make him poor again, so hellish had been the poverty of his Irish childhood. Both young Gene O`Neil and his older brother Jamie tried their hands at acting, and though Jamie was more successful than Gene, he never developed a significant, independent career as a professional thespian due to instability caused by his alcoholism. Jamie relied on his father for work, which further fueled his drinking.

Jamie O`Neil was a full-blown alcoholic, just like his younger brother, Gene, and he drank himself to death at a relatively young age, a fate Gene managed to avoid, but not from trying. The characters of Jamie in Long Day`s Journey Into Night and James Tyrone, Jr., in A Moon for the Misbegotten were based on him.

As a young man, Eugene O`Neil suffered from tuberculosis, which likely exacerbated his propensity for pessimism. (The stuff of his life became the guts of his last masterpiece, Long Day`s Journey Into Night. His pessimistic, tragic outlook on life likely was hereditary: O`Neil`s two sons, Eugene O`Neil, Jr. and Shane O`Neil, became substance abusers as adults: Eugene, Jr was an alcoholic and Shane was a heroin addict. Both committed suicide. (His daughter Oona Chaplin he disowned, for marrying Charles Chaplin, who was just six months younger than he. He had never had much to do with her, anyways, nor any of his children. His life was devoted to writing.)

After recovering from TB, O`Neil attended Princeton for the 1907-08 term, but was kicked out after his freshman year, allegedly for being drunk and disorderly at a reception held by the university president, future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. For the next eight years, he led a free-booting existence, fortune-hunting for gold in South America, and plying the seas as an able-bodied seaman while trying to drink himself to death. He even made an attempt at suicide. Eventually he returned to New York City and tried his hand a writing plays, and with the financial help of his father, studied playwriting at Harvard in 1915. His father was unimpressed by the results, and died the same year his son made his big breakthrough on Broadway. (He did live to see the production of Eugene`s first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, which opened on February 2, 1920 and ran for 111 performances, and and its honoring with the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama that May. James O`Neil, Sr. died on August 10, 1920. His namesake, James O`Neil, Jr., died three years later, at the age of 45.)

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey Into Night is often numbered on the short list of being among the finest American plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Early life

Birthplace plaque (1500 Broadway, northeast corner of 43rd & Broadway, NYC), presented by Circle in the Square.

O'Neill was born in a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, on what was then Longacre Square (now Times Square). A commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957. The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which houses offices, retail, and ABC Studios.

He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, who was also of Irish descent. Because his father was often on tour with a theatrical company, accompanied by Eugene's mother, O'Neill was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he found his only solace in books. His father suffered from alcoholism; his mother from an addiction to morphine, prescribed to relieve the pains of the difficult birth of her third son, Eugene.

O'Neill spent his summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. He attended Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to why he left. He may have been dropped for attending too few classes, been suspended for "conduct code violations," or "for breaking a window", or according to a more concrete but possibly apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle into the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson", the future president of the United States.

O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression and alcoholism. Despite this, he had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which was fighting for improved living conditions for the working class using quick 'on the job' direct action. O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie (who drank himself to death at the age of 45) died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater.

Career

O'Neill's first play, Bound East for Cardiff, premiered at this theatre on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays (the events immediately prior to going to the sanatorium are dramatized in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night). O'Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting.

In the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by Professor George Baker. He left after one year and did not complete the course.

During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he also befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of America founder John Reed. O'Neill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. O'Neill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds, about the life of John Reed.

His involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. O'Neill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays." Susan Glaspell describes what was probably the first ever reading of Bound East for Cardiff which took place in the living room of Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook's home on Commercial Street, adjacent to the wharf (pictured) that was used by the Players for their theater. Glaspell writes in The Road to the Temple, "So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff out of his trunk, and Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished." The Provincetown Players performed many of O'Neill's early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and then moved to Broadway.

O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U.S. occupation of Haiti that was a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. His best-known plays include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature after he had been nominated that year by Henrik Schück, member of the Swedish Academy. After a ten-year pause, O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The following year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and it was decades before coming to be considered as among his best works.

He was also part of the modern movement to partially revive the classical heroic mask from ancient Greek theatre and Japanese Noh theatre in some of his plays, such as The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed.

Family life

"Spithead", the 18th Century Bermudian home of Hezekiah Frith and 20th Century home of Eugene O'Neill.

O'Neill was married to Kathleen Jenkins from October 2, 1909 to 1912, during which time they had one son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (1910–1950). In 1917, O'Neill met Agnes Boulton, a successful writer of commercial fiction, and they married on April 12, 1918. They lived in a home owned by her parents in Point Pleasant, New Jersey after their marriage. The years of their marriage—during which the couple lived in Connecticut and Bermuda and had two children, Shane and Oona—are described vividly in her 1958 memoir Part of a Long Story. They divorced in 1929, after O'Neill abandoned Boulton and the children for the actress Carlotta Monterey (born San Francisco, California, December 28, 1888; died Westwood, New Jersey, November 18, 1970). O'Neill and Carlotta married less than a month after he officially divorced his previous wife.

O'Neill in the mid-1930s. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936

In 1929, O'Neill and Monterey moved to the Loire Valley in central France, where they lived in the Château du Plessis in Saint-Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. During the early 1930s they returned to the United States and lived in Sea Island, Georgia, at a house called Casa Genotta. He moved to Danville, California in 1937 and lived there until 1944. His house there, Tao House, is today the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site.

In their first years together, Monterey organized O'Neill's life, enabling him to devote himself to writing. She later became addicted to potassium bromide, and the marriage deteriorated, resulting in a number of separations, although they never divorced.

Actress Carlotta Monterey in Plymouth Theatre production of O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, 1922. Monterey later became the playwright's third wife.

In 1943, O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona for marrying the English actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54. He never saw Oona again.

He also had distant relationships with his sons. Eugene O'Neill, Jr., a Yale classicist, suffered from alcoholism and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40. Shane O'Neill became a heroin addict and moved into the family home in Bermuda, Spithead, with his new wife, where he supported himself by selling off the furnishings. He was disowned by his father before also committing suicide (by jumping out of a window) a number of years later. Oona ultimately inherited Spithead and the connected estate (subsequently known as the Chaplin Estate). In 1950 O'Neill joined The Lambs, the famed theater club.

Child Date of birth Date of death

Eugene O'Neill, Jr 1910 1950

Shane O'Neill 1918 1977

Oona O'Neill 14/05/1925 27/09/1991

Illness and death

After suffering from multiple health problems (including depression and alcoholism) over many years, O'Neill ultimately faced a severe Parkinsons-like tremor in his hands which made it impossible for him to write during the last 10 years of his life; he had tried using dictation but found himself unable to compose in that way. While at Tao House, O’Neill had intended to write a cycle of 11 plays chronicling an American family since the 1800s. Only two of these, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions were ever completed. As his health worsened, O’Neill lost inspiration for the project and wrote three largely autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He managed to complete Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943, just before leaving Tao House and losing his ability to write. Drafts of many other uncompleted plays were destroyed by Carlotta at Eugene’s request.

O'Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65. As he was dying, he whispered his last words: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room." (The building later became the Shelton Hall dormitory at Boston University. There is an urban legend perpetuated by students that O'Neill's spirit haunts the room and dormitory.) A revised analysis of his autopsy report shows that, contrary to the previous diagnosis, he did not have Parkinson's disease, but a late-onset cerebellar cortical atrophy.

Dr. Harry Kozol, the lead prosecuting expert of the Patty Hearst trial, treated O'Neill during these last years of illness. He also was present for O'Neill's death and announced the fact to the public.

O'Neill is interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

In 1956 Carlotta arranged for his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night to be published, although his written instructions had stipulated that it not be made public until 25 years after his death. It was produced on stage to tremendous critical acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. This last play is widely considered to be his finest. Other posthumously-published works include A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).

The United States Postal Service honored O'Neill with a Prominent Americans series (1965–1978) $1 postage stamp.

Influence on African American actors

O’Neill had major influence on African American actors, in particular Paul Leroy Robeson. O’Neill and Robeson worked on three productions together: All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), The Emperor Jones (1924), and The Hairy Ape (1931). Jones, however, did not originate the lead role in O’Neill's The Emperor Jones. Charles Sidney Gilpin, a respected leading man from the all-black Lafayette Players of Harlem, was the first actor to play the role of Brutus Jones when it was first staged on November 1, 1920, by the Provincetown Players at the Playwright's Theater in New York City.. This production was O'Neill's first real smash hit. The Players' small theater was too small to cope with audience demand for tickets, and the play was transferred to another theater. It ran for 204 performances and was hugely popular, and toured in the States with this cast for the next two years. Gilpin continued to perform the role of Brutus Jones in the U.S. tour that followed the Broadway closing of the play, and In 1920 became the first black American to receive the Drama League of New York's annual award as one of the ten people who had done the most that year for American theater. The following year Gilpin was awarded the NAACPs Spingarn Medal. He was also honored at the White House by president Warren G. Harding. A year later, the Dumas Dramatic Club (now the Karamu Players) of Cleveland renamed itself the Gilpin Players in his honor. Though the acclaimed actor continued to perform in subsequent productions of the play, he eventually had a falling out with O'Neill who argued with Gilpin's tendency to change his use of the word "nigger" to Negro and colored during performances. Gilpin wanted O'Neill to remove the word "nigger" from the play altogether, which occurred frequently in the play, but the playwright refused, arguing its use was consistent with his dramatic intentions and that the use of language was, in fact, based on a friend, an African-American tavern-keeper on the New London waterfront that was O'Neill's favorite drinking spot in his home town. When they could not come to a reconciliation, O'Neill replaced the middle-aged Gilpin with the much younger and then unknown Paul Robeson, who had only performed on the concert stage. Robeson starred in the title role in the 1924 New York revival and in the London production. He received excellent reviews and, coupled with his performance in the 1928 London production of the musical Show Boat, went on to worldwide fame as one of the great black artists of the 20th century. The show was again revived in 1926 at the Mayfair Theatre in Manhattan, with Gilpin again starring as Jones and also directing the show. The production, which ran for 61 performances, is remembered today for the acting debut of a young Moss Hart as Smithers and broke social barriers and defied conventions of the day as the first American play to feature an African-American central character portrayed in a serious manner. The play was adapted for a 1933 feature film starring Paul Robeson, directed by Dudley Murphy, an avant-garde filmmaker of O'Neill's Greenwich Village circle who pursued the reluctant playwright for a decade before getting the rights from him. Gilpin continued to make a small living performing monologues from O'Neill's play at church gatherings, but after the extended controversy and the disappointment of losing his signature role, succumbed to depression and began drinking heavily. He never again performed on Broadway and died in 1930 in Eldridge Park, New Jersey, his career in shambles. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, his funeral arranged by friends shortly after his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_O%27Neill