Eugene O'Neill

(born 1878) and Edmund (1883), who died at the age of two from measles, leaving Ella distraught.

Their last son, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (his middle name a salute to the British prime minister who was in favor of home rule for Ireland), was born at the Barrett Hotel (home of many theatrical artistes) in New York City, on October 16, 1888. Supposedly, it was a difficult delivery, and in the spirit of the times, Ella was given morphine for her pain. She became an addict. James O'Neill made a fortune playing The Count of Monte Cristo, both on Broadway in multiple productions and as a touring show. However, he suffered an artistic death as a performing artiste through the sheer repetition of the Monte Cristo role, which he turned to repeatedly as it always proved a success. He reportedly played the role at least 4,000 times, perhaps nearly twice that number. He would provide the prototype for the character of James Tyrone, the pater familias in his son's "Long Day's Journey Into Night". James O'Neill Sr. knew that he had suffered artistically from his commercial instincts, and Eugene never forgot that. His son remained steadfast in his own fidelity to his principles of artistic integrity. The father also was a notorious skinflint, terrified that some unforeseen calamity would throw him back into the hellish poverty of his childhood in Ireland. Both young Gene and his older brother Jamie tried their hands at acting, and though Jamie was more successful than Gene, he never developed a significant, independent career as a professional thespian due to instability caused by his alcoholism. Jamie relied on his father for work, which further fueled his drinking. Jamie was a full-blown alcoholic, just like his younger brother, Gene, and he drank himself to death at a relatively young age, a fate Gene managed to avoid, but not from lack of trying. The characters of Jamie in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and James Tyrone Jr. in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" were based on him. As a young man, Eugene suffered from tuberculosis, which likely exacerbated his propensity for pessimism (the stuff of his life became the guts of his last masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey Into Night"). His pessimistic, tragic outlook on life likely was hereditary: O'Neill's two sons, Eugene O'Neill Jr. and Shane O'Neill, became substance abusers as adults: Eugene Jr. was an alcoholic and Shane was a heroin addict. Both committed suicide. He disowned his daughter Oona Chaplin, for marrying Charles Chaplin, who was just six months younger than O'Neill himself. He had never had much to do with her anyway, nor any of his children. His life was devoted to writing.

After recovering from tuberculosis, O'Neill attended Princeton for the 1907-08 term, but was kicked out after his freshman year, allegedly for being drunk and disorderly at a reception held by the university president, future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. For the next eight years he led a freebooting existence, fortune-hunting for gold in South America and plying the seas as an able-bodied seaman, while trying to drink himself to death (he even made an attempt at suicide).

Son, with Kathleen Jenkins, Eugene Jr. (born 1910).

Eventually he returned to New York City and tried his hand at playwriting, and with the financial help of his father, studied playwriting at Harvard in 1915.

His father was unimpressed by the results, and died the same year his son made his big breakthrough on Broadway (he did live to see the production of Eugene's first full-length play, "Beyond the Horizon", which opened on February 2, 1920 and ran for a then-impressive 111 performances, and its honoring with the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama that May. James O'Neill Sr.

died on August 10, 1920. His namesake, James O'Neill Jr. , died three years later, at the age of 45.

As a dramatist, he had flourished on Broadway from 1920, when his first full-length work, "Beyond the Horizon", debuted, winning him his first Pulitzer, until 1934, when his first and only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (debut October 1933) came to an end that June and his play, "Days Without End," was staged in repertory between January and November).

Born under the astrological sign of Libra. Though astrology does not overtly figure in his work, his personal library (now preserved at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) contained a book, "From Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars" by Evangeline Smith Adams (New York: Mead and Company, 1930) personally inscribed to him by the author.

Was asked by MGM, in 1932, to write a screenplay for Jean Harlow, whom he did not admire, and to cable back his response in twenty words or less, collect. His response read thus: "No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. O'Neill." This incident was incorporated, almost verbatim, into Harold Robbins' roman a clef on early Hollywood, "The Carpetbaggers.".

After 1934, he entered a cocoon, staying away from Broadway until after World War II, when the 1946 production of "The Iceman Cometh" debuted.

Eugene O'Neill, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered the greatest American playwright. No one, not Maxwell Anderson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, nor Edward Albee, approaches O'Neill in terms of his artistic achievement or his impact on the American theater.

)Where Eugene truly learned his craft was in the writing of one-act melodramas that dealt with the lives of sailors, that were performed by the Provincetown Players, which had theaters in Provincetown on Cape Cod and off of Washington Square in New York City (John Ford made a 1940 movie out of four of his sea plays, collected in The Long Voyage Home (1940)). The theater he created was a reaction against the theater of his father, the old hoary melodramas that packed them in for a night of crowd-pleasing entertainment. Eugene started out as a dramatist at a time when there was an average of 70 plays being performed on Broadway each week. The Great White Way resembled a modern movie multiplex in that potential theatergoers would peruse the various marquees in and around Times Square seeking an entertainment for the night. At the time O'Neill began to establish himself, in pre- and post-World War I era, entertainment was first and foremost in most people's minds. The movies and O'Neill would change that. The competition of the more sophisticated movies of the late silent era, and then the talkies, usurped the position of Broadway and the theater as the premier venue for American entertainment. The light plays that were the equivalent of television fare became extinct. Musicals continued to thrive, as did comedies, but drama became more serious and developed a psychological depth. O'Neill was the midwife of the phenomenon. Eugene O'Neill helped foster the maturation of American drama, as he incorporated the techniques of both European expressionism and realism in his work. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, brought to the American stage a tragic vision that influenced scores of American playwrights that followed.

Allegedly, his last words were, "Born in a hotel room, and goddammit! Died in one!" His health had been hurt by his alcoholism and he suffered from Parkinson's disease-like tremors of his hands that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to write since the early 1940s. It is believed that he suffered cerebellar cortical abiotrophy, a neurological disease in which certain neurons in the cerebellum of the brain die off, adversely affecting the balance and coordination of the sufferer.

Eugene O'Neill died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1953.

Won two Tony Awards in 1957 for "Long Day's Journey into Night:" as Best Author (Dramatic) and as author of the Best Play winner. In 1959, he was also nominated as author of Best Play nominee "A Touch of the Poet." All of O'Neill's Tony recognition was posthumous.

Pictured on the $1.00 US postage stamp in the original Prominent Americans series, issued 16 October 1967.

His play, "A Moon for the Misbegotten," was nominated for the 1973 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Play Production that was performed at the Academy Festival Theatre with Colleen Dewhurst and directed by George Keathley.

His play, "The Iceman Cometh" in the University of California Center of for the Arts and Theatre Group production at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre in Los Angeles, California was awarded the 1986 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Distinguished Production.

Cause of death, previously thought to be Parkinson's disease, revised in 2000 after further study of the autopsy report.

His play, Mourning Becomes Electra performed at the Royal National Theatre: Lyttelton, was awarded the 2004 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Revival of 2003.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors." New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 338-348. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

His play, "A Moon for the Misbegotten," at the First Folio Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2009 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production of a Play-Midsize.

His play, "The Iceman Cometh" at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was awarded the 2012 Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for Play Production (Large).

His play, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the Court Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2016 Joseph Jefferson (Equity) Award for Large Play Production.

James O'Neill, one of the most popular actors of the late 19th century, was his father, so one could say that Eugene O'Neill was born to a life in the theater. His father, who had been born into poverty in Ireland before emigrating to the United States, developed his craft and became a star in the theaters of the Midwest. He married Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan, the Irish-American daughter of a wealthy Cleveland businessman, whose death when she was a teenager had hurt her emotionally. She remained emotionally fragile throughout her life, a condition exacerbated by a further tragedy, the loss of a child. A further strain was placed on her when it was discovered that James had lived in "concubinage" with a common-law wife who later sued him for child support and alimony, claiming he had fathered her child. Both were pious and believing Catholics. They had three sons, including James Jr.