With Irish actors, writers and filmmakers nominated across a variety of categories at this year’s Academy Awards, Dr Eoin Kinsella digs into the Dictionary of Irish Biography to look at some of our earliest Oscar nominees and winners…

OVER THE PAST few weeks, Irish actress Jessie Buckley has been nominated for virtually every major acting award for her powerful portrayal of a grieving mother in the big-screen adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet.

Currently tipped to take home the Oscar for best actress at this week’s Academy Awards – which would be an Irish first – Buckley is just the third Irish woman to be nominated in the main acting category, after Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn (2015), Lady bird (2017) and Little women (2019)) and Ruth Negga (Loving (2016)).

Buckley’s nomination got us wondering in the DIB office: who were the earliest Irish Oscar nominees? It turns out that Dublin-born Herbert Brenon attended the very first Academy Awards ceremony, held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles, on 16 May 1929.

His Sorrell and Son (1928) earned him a nomination for best director, though he lost out to Frank Borzage for 7th Heaven. But George Bernard Shaw was the first Irish person to win an Academy Award, taking the 1938 prize for best adapted screenplay for Pygmalion (dir. Asquith and Howard, 1938).

Jessie Buckley is favourite for the Best Actress award this year. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The first Irish nominee for an acting award, Geraldine Fitzgerald, initially learned her craft from her aunt, Shelah Richards. After a season at the Gate Theatre (1933–4), Fitzgerald moved to London, where she made her movie debut before emigrating to New York City with her husband in 1938.

There, Fitzgerald made an immediate impact with her appearances on Broadway. Cast in the role of Isabella Linton in a film adaptation of Wuthering Heights (dir. William Wyler, 1939), opposite Laurence Olivier and David Niven, Fitzgerald was nominated at the 1939 Academy Awards for best supporting actress. Olivier later disowned the film, but declared that Fitzgerald’s performance was ‘the only thing that still holds up’.

In her long film career, she never again reached that level of recognition, though she continued to appear on both the big and small screens, remained a powerful presence on stage and became an acclaimed theatre director.

Just two years after Fitzgerald’s nomination, Sara Allgood was nominated for best supporting actress for her performance as Beth Morgan in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941). A veteran of the Abbey Theatre’s early years and a founding member of the National Theatre Society, Allgood toured in London and the US with Abbey productions and, from the late 1920s, began to secure film work.

How Green Was My Valley was a high point in her screen career – she appeared in the film alongside other Abbey alumni, including brothers Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur ‘Boss’ Shields. Maureen O’Hara, then a twenty-one-year-old rising star, played Allgood’s daughter.

Bette Davis, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Virginnia Brissac in the 1939 film Dark Victory. Geraldine Mary Fitzgerald was an Irish actress and a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Allgood’s Abbey compatriot Barry Fitzgerald (no relation to Geraldine) holds the distinction of being the first Irishman to be nominated for an acting Oscar. In fact, he was the first to be nominated for best actor and best supporting actor – uniquely, both nominations came for his performance as Fr Fitzgibbon in Going My Way (dir. Leo McCarey, 1944).

He took home the award for best supporting actor, but while practising his golf swing a couple of days later, he accidentally decapitated the statue. Multiple nominations for a single performance were subsequently banned, leaving Fitzgerald as the first and last person to achieve that feat.

Fitzgerald and Allgood’s backgrounds in theatre were vital to their later successes, and both frequently appeared in productions of Sean O’Casey’s ‘Dublin’ trilogy. The third instalment in the trilogy, The Plough and the Stars, debuted in the Abbey Theatre exactly 100 years ago, on 8 February 1926.

O’Casey later wrote a part in The Silver Tassie especially for Fitzgerald; when the Abbey rejected the script, O’Casey persuaded Fitzgerald to perform in the play’s debut production in London in October 1929. This was the catalyst for Fitzgerald’s move into professional acting and paved the way for his transition to the silver screen.

We find more early Academy Award nominees on the other side of the camera. The gifted filmmaker Patrick Carey was born in London in 1916 and moved to Dublin with his family in 1923. His mother, Mary, acted at the Gate Theatre and was a co-founder of the Irish Film Society.

Following in her footsteps, Carey treaded the boards at the Gate before touring Eastern Europe alongside Mícheál MacLiammóir shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war, Carey moved into filmmaking and trained at London’s Green Park Studios. In 1965, he was commissioned by the Department of External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs) to make Yeats Country, which commemorated the centenary of W. B. Yeats’ birth; the film won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated at that year’s Academy Awards for best documentary short. Five years later, in 1970, Carey was again nominated in the same category for Oisín, commissioned by the Department of Lands as Ireland’s contribution to the European Conservation Year.

Any trawl through the DIB’s corpus for links to the Oscars will throw up the name of Fr Edward J. Flanagan, an Oscar ‘winner’ who was never actually nominated for an Academy Award. Born in Co. Roscommon in 1886, Flanagan emigrated to New York City in 1904 and was ordained as a priest – after several health-related setbacks – in Austria in 1912.

He settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he established a boys’ home in 1917. In 1921, he bought a 120-acre farm and raised $200,000 to build ‘Boys Town’, providing shelter and education for homeless boys. By 1936, Boys Town had become an official village, with its own sports teams, post office, elected mayor and courts. The Boys Town story was adapted into a movie of the same name and released in 1938, securing five Academy Award nominations.

Spencer Tracy, then one of Hollywood’s leading men, won best actor for his portrayal of Flanagan. Accepting the award, Tracy declared that the award really belonged to Flanagan. Following some confusion about whether or not Tracy had intended to gift the award to Flanagan (he hadn’t), the Academy made a second statuette for the Boys Town founder, with a unique inscription: ‘To Father Edward J. Flanagan, whose great human qualities, timely simplicity, and inspiring courage were strong enough to shine through my humble effort. Spencer Tracy.’ (James Curtis, Spencer Tracy: a biography (2011), 364).

Dr Eoin Kinsella is managing editor of the Dictionary of Irish Biography. He has published widely on Irish history and his books include The Irish Defence Forces, 1922-2022: servant of the nation (2023); The Irish Dental Association: a centenary history (2023); Dublin City University, 1980-2020: designed to be different (2020); Catholic Survival in Protestant Ireland, 1660-1711 (2018); and Leopardstown Park Hospital, 1917-2017: a home for wounded soldiers(2017).

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