Stage and screen actress Geraldine Fitzgerald died on Sunday, July 17, after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. She was 91.
Before becoming a Warner Bros. contract player in the early 1940s, the Irish-born Fitzgerald had a career in British films, most notably as one of the leads in the 1937 screen adaptation of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.
Among her most important screen roles in Hollywood are those in Wuthering Heights (1939, above, with Laurence Olivier), as Heathcliff's miserable wife, a performance that brought her a well-deserved Oscar nomination for best supporting actress; Wilson (1944), the prestigious (and incredibly dull) Fox biopic of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, starring Alexander Knox; Ten North Frederick (1958), excellent as Gary Cooper's shrewish wife; Harry and Tonto (1974), another outstanding turn as an elderly woman suffering from dementia; and the so-so stab at screwball comedy, Arthur (1981), as a cranky millionairess.
If ever there was a first-rate (and quite pretty) actress who deserved to become a film star, that was Geraldine Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, she never quite made it on film, though she did become a renowned name on the New York stage, playing Mary Tyrone opposite Robert Ryan in a 1971 off-Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and in a 1977 revival of O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet with Jason Robards.