Sara Allgood as “Kathleen.”

Sara Allgood as “Kathleen.”

Vintage photograph of the 1912 production of W. B. Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan. Provenance: Lady Gregory.

Sara Allgood, who studied acting under the Fay brothers and Maud Gonne when she was only twenty years old, became the actress perhaps most associated with the Abbey Theatre. She originated roles in Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), in Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1905) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), and in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Later Allgood moved to Hollywood, where she starred in early films by Alfred Hitchcock and in John Ford’s How Green was my Valley. Her younger sister Maire O’Neill, also an important actress for the Abbey Theatre, was Synge’s fiancée before his early death.