Kathleen Ryan was born in Dublin in 1922. Her parents owned the famous Monument Dairies in the city. Regarded as one of the beauties of her day, she was captured on portrait by Louis le Brocquy in 1941. This portrait now hangs in the Ulster Museum. She was cast opposite James Mason in her first film “Odd Man Out” directed by Carol Reed in 1947. This film is now regarded as a masterpiece. She played opposite the leading actors of the time including Stewart Granger, Rock Hudson and John Gregson. In 1950 she went to Hollywood to make her only American movie “The Sound of Fury”. Her last film was in 1957 and she died in 1985.
“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”:
Tall, copper-haired Irish actress with lovely complexion and attractively soft spoken voice. She was mostly typed as flowing-haired colleens after a brilliant success in the leading female role of her first film. Consequently, she made too few films and despite a couple of invitations to Hollywood, her career petered out.
An interesting article on Kathleen Ryan can be found online here.
Kathleen Ryan (Wikipedia).
Kathleen Ryan was born in Dublin, Ireland of Tipperary parentage and appeared in British and Hollywood films between 1947 and 1957.
Kathleen Ryan was one of the eight children of Séamus Ryan, a member of Seanad Éireann and his wife Agnes Ryan née Harding who came from Kilfeacle and Solohead respectively in County Tipperary and who were Republican activists during the Irish War of Independence. They opened a shop in Parnell Street, Dublin in the 1920s which was the first of 36 outlets which were known as “The Monument Creameries”
. The family lived at Burton Hall, near Leopardstown Racecourse in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock. Her brother was John Ryan, an artist and man of letters in bohemian Dublin of the 1940s and 50’s, who was a friend and benefactor of a number of struggling writers in the post-war era, such as Patrick Kavanagh. He started and edited a short-lived literary magazine entitled Envoy. Among her other siblings were Fr. Vincent (Séamus) (1930–2005), a Benedictine priest at Glenstal Abbey, Sister Íde of the Convent of The Sacred Heart, Mount Anville, Dublin, Oonagh (who married the Irish artist Patrick Swift), Cora who married the politician, Seán Dunne, T.D. When Kathleen was an undergraduate at University College Dublin, she was introduced to the future Dr. Dermod Devane of Limerick. They were married in the society wedding of 1944 and the couple had three children, but the marriage was annulled in 1958.
As one of Ireland’s great beauties of her time, she was the subject of one of Louis le Brocquy‘s most striking portraits, Girl in White, which he painted in 1941 and entered in the RHA exhibition of that year. The portrait (oil on canvas) is in the Ulster Museum collection. She died in Dublin, from a lung ailment aged 63 and was buried with her parents beneath an imposing statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, near the Republican Plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
Ryan, Kathleen (1922–85), actress, was born on 8 September 1922 above her parents’ shop on Camden Street, Dublin, the first of eight children of James (Seamus) Ryan (qv) and his wife Agnes Ryan (qv) (née Harding). Originally from Tipperary, her parents owned and managed a thriving chain of groceries called the Monument Creamery, amassing over thirty outlets throughout the city. Her father was also prominent within the Fianna Fáil party, serving as a senator up to his untimely death in 1933.
Kathleen grew up in increasingly prosperous surrounds, as the family moved first to a red-bricked residence in Rathgar in the 1920s and then into a mansion in Sandyford in 1938. At the age of six she was sent to Bruff boarding school in Co. Limerick and later attended Mount Anville college in Dublin before being sent to a finishing school in Paris. Following the German conquest of France in 1940, she returned home and studied for a B.Comm.degree in UCD. Endowed with fine, alabaster features and a cascade of reddish auburn hair, she was a great beauty and the subject in 1941 of a much-admired portrait by Louis Le Brocquy (1916–2012), ‘Girl in white’, now in the National Museums Northern Ireland.
Appearing on stage from 1940, she first performed at the Peacock theatre opposite Dan O’Herlihy (qv) in the UCD Players’ production of Thomas Dekker’s ‘The shoemaker’s holiday’. She lost interest in pursuing a degree, eventually dropping out of college, but not before meeting Dermod Devane, a medical student from Limerick. They were considered the most attractive couple in UCD, if not Ireland, and their marriage in 1944 was a major society event. They had three children and lived in Ballinacurra, Co. Limerick.
She continued as a professional theatre actress, but her experience was still quite limited when in 1946 she was chosen (on O’Herlihy’s recommendation) as the female lead in the Carol Reed-directed film Odd man out. Despite never having performed in the Abbey theatre, she vaulted over a host of Abbey regulars populating the supporting cast, fuelling suspicions that her casting owed more to her looks and perhaps her family’s wealth than to acting ability. Depicting the final hours of a wounded IRA gunman, played by James Mason, the film surely resonated with her mother Agnes who had harboured and assisted IRA fugitives during the Anglo–Irish war of 1919–21. Kathleen’s role as Mason’s girlfriend conspicuously failed to convey the liveliness and wit of her true personality. Acting almost solely through her dolefully expressive eyes, she was obliged to maintain a downcast and dour countenance throughout, which, however, conferred an implacability that added to the violent denouement. Released in 1947, Odd man out was a critical and commercial success, and is considered a noir classic.
Thereafter, the Rank Organisation, the biggest British film company, built her up as one of its leading starlets. From 1947 to 1957 she appeared in a further eleven British (mainly) and American films, starring alongside Rock Hudson, Dirk Bogarde and Stewart Granger. Three of these films dealt with Irish subjects – Captain Boycott (1947), Captain Lightfoot (1955) andJacqueline (1956). While Odd man out enabled her to pursue a movie career, it had the effect of restricting her to ‘mournful Dark Rosaleen parts’ (Ní Riain, 98), which was perhaps also due to a limited acting range. Her role in Esther Waters (1948) gave her an opportunity to overcome this typecasting, which she failed to exploit, suffering from poor directing and an over-earnest production. She slipped down the billing and a seven-film contract signed with a Hollywood studio in 1952 produced only two roles.
Her career was further hindered by personal problems. In 1954, after being involved in a car accident near Ballinacurra in which a travelling salesman lost a leg, she was obliged to pay £7,000 in compensation by the civil courts. A serious accident, presumably the same one, also permanently affected her health. Her later films were of a poor standard and her movie career petered out in 1958. So too did her marriage. She returned to Dublin to live with family, continuing thereafter to be dogged by ill health, which she bore stoically while occasionally engaging in self-reproachful reminiscences. Living latterly in Killiney, Co. Dublin, she died of lung cancer in Baggot Street hospital, Dublin, on 11 December 1985, and was buried with her parents in Glasnevin cemetery.
Sources
Sunday Independent, 31 July 1949; 3 July 2011; Limerick Leader, 4 Sept. 1954; Ir. Times, 26 Oct. 1955; 12, 18 Dec. 1985; Ir. Independent, 12 Dec. 1985; Íde Ní Riain, The life and times of Mrs A. V. Ryan (née Agnes Harding) of the Monument Creameries (1986); Steve Brennan and Bernadette O’Neill, Emeralds in Tinseltown: the Irish in Hollywood (2007), 154; ‘Not quite a femme fatale’, Gareth’s Movie Diary (18 Feb. 2011), garethsmovies.blogspot.co.uk; Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com (internet material accessed Nov. 2013)
Article on Kathleen Ryan by Liam Collins in Belfast Telegraph in Jan 2020.