Biography for
Eugene O'Neill (I)

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Date of Birth

16 October 1888, New York, New York, USA

Date of Death

27 November 1953, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (cerebellar cortical atrophy)

Birth Name

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

Height

5' 11" (1.80 m)

Mini Biography

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.)

Where Eugene O'Neil truly learned his craft as in the writing of one-act melodramas that dealt with the lives of sailors that were performed by the Provincetown Players, who had theaters in Provincetown on Cape Cod and off of Washington Square in New York City. (John Ford made a 1940 movie out of four of his sea plays, collected in The Long Voyage Home (1940).) The theater he created was a reaction against the theater of his father, the old hoary melodramas that packed 'em in for a night of crowd-pleasin' entertainment.

Eugene O'Neil started out as a dramatist in the time when Broadway had 70 plays being performed each week. The Great White Way resembled a modern movie multiplex in that potential theatergoers would peruse the various marquees in and around Times Square seeking an entertainment for the night. For most plays, at the time that O'Neil began to establish himself in the time of the Great War and immediate post-War years were entertainment, first and foremost.

The movies and O'Neil would change that. The competition of the more sophisticated movies of the late silent era, and then the talkies, doomed Broadway and the theater as the premier venue for American entertainment. The light plays that were the equivalent of television fare became extinct. Musicals considered to thrive, as did comedies, but drama became more serious and developed a psychological depth. O'Neil was the midwife of the phenomenon.

Eugene O'Neil helped foster the process of maturation of American drama, as he incorporate the techniques of both European expressionism and realism in his work. Influenced by Ibsen and Strindberg, brought to the American stage a tragic vision that influenced scores of American playwrights that came after him.

Eugene O'Neil died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston, Massachuestts on 1953. Allegedly, his last words were, "Born in a hotel room, and goddammit! Died in one!" His health had been hurt by his alcoholism and he suffered from Parkinson's disease-like tremors of his hands that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to write since the early 1940s. It is believed that he suffered cerebellar cortical abiotrophy, a neurological disease in which certain neurons in the cerebellum of the brain die off, adversely affecting the balance and coordination of the sufferer. As a dramatist, he had flourished on Broadway from 1920, when his first full-length work, Beyond the Horizon, debuted, winning him his first Pulitzer, until 1934, when his first and only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (debut October 1933) came to an end that June and his play, "Days Without End," was staged in repertory between January and November). After 1934, he entered a cocoon, staying away from Broadway until after World War II, when the 1946 production of The Iceman Cometh debuted. The first production of "Iceman" failed, and O'Neil's reputation suffered, but the 1956 production of "Iceman" starring Jason Robards and directed by José Quintero was a great success, as was the posthumous production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, which brought O'Neil his fourth Pulitzer. The two plays solidified his legend.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

Spouse

Carlotta Monterey	(22 July 1929 - 27 November 1953) (his death)
Agnes Boulton	(12 April 1918 - 3 July 1929) (divorced) 2 children
Kathleen Jenkins	(2 October 1909 - 1912) (divorced) 1 child

Trivia

Cause of death, previously thought to be Parkinson's disease, revised in 2000 after further study of the autopsy report.

Father of Oona Chaplin.

Father-in-law of Charles Chaplin.

Grandfather of Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Chaplin, 'Jane', 'Eugene', Michael Chaplin, Victoria Chaplin and 'Annette-Emilie'.

He left several unpublished plays and an autobiography. His will stipulated that these were not to be produced until 25 years after his death.

Was awarded the 1936 Nobel prize in literature.

Son of actor James O'Neill.

Pictured on the $1.00 US postage stamp in the original Prominent Americans series, issued 16 October 1967.

Daughter, with Agnes Boulton, Oona (born 1925).

Son, with Agnes Boulton, Shane (born 1919).

Son, with Kathleen Jenkins, Eugene Jr. (born 1910).

Many consider him the father of the modern American theatre; most of his plays were brutally realistic. They were all completely free of the stilted, melodramatic, overwritten language used in American nineteenth-century melodramas, and which seems unintentionally hilarious to modern audiences. His style, in one way or another, influenced all American dramatists who were either his contemporaries or who came after him.

Great-grandfather of Dolores Chaplin, Carmen Chaplin, Aurélia Thiérrée, and James Thiérrée.

His play, Mourning Becomes Electra performed at the Royal National Theatre: Lyttelton, was awarded the 2004 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Revival of 2003.

Was asked by MGM, in 1932, to write a screenplay for Jean Harlow, whom he did not admire, and to cable back his response in twenty words or less, collect. His response read thus: "No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. O'Neill." This incident was incorporated, almost verbatim, into Harold Robbins' roman a clef on early Hollywood, "The Carpetbaggers.".

Disowned and cut off communication from his daughter, Oona Chaplin, after she married Charles Chaplin, who was exactly six months his junior, in age.

Won two Tony Awards in 1957 for "Long Day's Journey into Night:" as Best Author (Dramatic) and as author of the Best Play winner. In 1959, he was also nominated as author of Best Play nominee "A Touch of the Poet." All of O'Neill's Tony recognition was posthumous.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors." New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 338-348. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

Born under the astrological sign of Libra. Though astrology does not overtly figure in his work, his personal library (now preserved at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) contained a book, "From Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars" by Evangeline Smith Adams (New York: Mead and Company, 1930) personally inscribed to him by the author.

Was the 1936 Nobel Laureate in Literature, the second American so honored.

Won a record four Pulitzer Prizes for drama: in 1920, for Beyond the Horizon (1975) (TV); in 1921, for Anna Christie (1930); in 1928, for Strange Interlude (1932); and in 1956, posthumously, for Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962).

Was expelled from Princeton University for throwing a beer bottle through the office window of the University's President. That was future United States President Woodrow Wilson.

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