Maire O'Neill

Maire O'Neill (12 January 1885 – 2 November 1952) was an Irish actress of stage and film.

Life

Born Mary Allgood, one of eight children of upholsterer George and French polisher Margaret (née Harold) Allgood, she was known as "Molly". Her father was sternly Protestant and against all music, dancing and entertainment, and her mother a strict Catholic. After her father's death she was placed in an orphanage. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker. One of Allgood's brothers, Tom, became a Catholic priest.

Maud Gonne set up Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) in 1900 to educate women about Irish history, language and the arts, and Allgood and her sister Sara joined the association's drama classes around 1903. Their acting teacher, Willie Fay, enrolled them in the National Theatre Society, later known as the Abbey Theatre.

In 1905 Molly met Irish playwright John Millington Synge and they fell in love, a relationship regarded as scandalous because it crossed the class barriers of the time. In September 1907 he had surgery for the removal of troublesome neck glands, but a later tumour was found to be inoperable. They became engaged before his death in March 1909. Synge wrote the plays The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows for Allgood.