Background
Dudley Digges was born on June 9, 1880, in Dublin, Ireland to James Dudley Digges and Catherine (Forsythe) Digges.
Dudley Digges was born on June 9, 1880, in Dublin, Ireland to James Dudley Digges and Catherine (Forsythe) Digges.
Digges was educated at the Christian Brothers' School (1886 - 1890) and St. Mary's College, Dublin (1890 - 1893), but thereafter he chose to study informally the craft of the theater under Frank J. Fay.
Dudley Digges joined the Fay brothers' Ormonde Dramatic Society in 1898 and by 1902 was sufficiently accomplished an actor to take his place among the charter members of the Irish National Theatre (later to take up residence at the Abbey Theatre), directed by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. In that initial season Digges appeared in the premieres of Yeats's Cathleenni-Houlihan and AE's Deirdre, among other works, and shortly thereafter traveled with the company to London. The trip occasioned an invitation to Digges and some of his companions to play at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri. The Irish season at the exposition was a fiasco of sorts: the somberness of the repertoire was ill suited to the liveliness of the occasion to such an extent that the actors at one performance at the large theater faced an audience consisting solely of a dozen or so Indians.
Digges's part in the venture ended when he argued with the exposition's management over the inclusion of anti-Irish elements in the entertainment in violation of the troupe's contract. He then went to work as a clerk in St. Louis until the producer Arnold Daly signed him to appear at New York's Garrick Theater in Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island (1904).
Digges remained in New York until 1907, playing with Mrs. Fiske, Ben Greet, and other noted actors of the day. Thereafter he spent about four years touring with Greet's company. From 1911 to 1918 Digges served as stage manager for the company of George Arliss. Up to this point Dudley Digges had earned a fine reputation among his colleagues, if not with the public, and a place among the founders of America's first great producing organization, the Theatre Guild.
Perhaps the greatest compliment one could pay Digges would be to list the actors with whom he worked - as actor and director - in his long association with the guild from its inception in 1919 until shortly before his death; it would include many of the most respected names in the American theater. Digges appeared in the guild's very first production, Jacinto Benavente's The Bonds of Interest (1919), whose cast, incidentally, included Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1920 Digges undertook one of the leads in Strindberg's Dance of Death, a rather daring work for the period. His roles were many and diverse; they included Boss Magnan in Shaw's Heartbreak House (1920), a lead in Karel 49apek's R. U. R. (1922), Mr. Zero in Elmer Rice's Adding Machine (1923), a role in support of the Lunts in Ferenc Moln r's The Guardsman (1924), Volpone (to Alfred Lunt's Mosca) in Stefan Zweig's adaptation of Jonson's classic (1928), and Andrew Undershaft in Shaw's Major Barbara (1928).
Digges's directorial duties for the guild included several memorable Shaw revivals that prompted the playwright to offer the Theatre Guild first refusal for the American productions of his later works.
After 1930 Digges acted in several non-guild productions, achieving stardom as the grandfather who tangles with death in On Borrowed Time (1938). On one of the occasions when he returned to the Theatre Guild's fold, to play Emperor Franz Joseph in Maxwell Anderson's Masque of Kings (1937), he chalked up his three-thousandth performance under guild auspices.
Digges made the first of his more than fifty film appearances as the prison warden in Condemned (1929). Although he played such roles as the Chinese hotel manager in The General Died at Dawn (1936) and the ship's doctor in Mutiny on the "Bounty" (1935), he was more likely to be cast in films as an irascible, but lovable, grandfatherly character, a role that drew upon the natural warmth and intelligence of the private man.
In 1946 Digges was reunited with the Theatre Guild when he masterfully assumed the role of the bar owner Harry Hope in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. It was to be his valediction to the theater, for he died of a stroke at his New York home the following year.
Quotes from others about the person
"The role we singled when we spoke his name/ Of instant goodness and deep faithfulness/ Will be sustained beyond the curtain fall. " - Padraic Colum
On August 27 of 1907 Digges married Mary Roden Quinn, an actress.
