Barry Fitzgerald (10 March 1888 - 14 January 1961) was an Irish stage, film and television actor. He won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for Going My Way (1944).

Life

He was born William Joseph Shields in Walworth Road, Portobello, Dublin, Ireland. He was the older brother of Irish actor Arthur Shields. He went to Skerry's College, Dublin, before going on to work in the civil service, while also working at the Abbey Theatre. By 1929, he turned to acting full-time. He was briefly a roommate of famed playwright Sean O'Casey and starred in such plays as O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and the premiere of The Silver Tassie.

Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to star in another O'Casey work, The Plough and the Stars (1936), directed by John Ford. He had a successful Hollywood career in such films as The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), And Then There Were None (1945), The Naked City (1948) and The Quiet Man (1952). Fitzgerald achieved a feat unmatched in the history of the Academy Awards: he was nominated for both the Best Actor Oscar and the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the same performance, as "Father Fitzgibbon" in Going My Way (1944). (Academy Award rules have since been changed to prevent this.) He won the Best Supporting Actor Award; an avid golfer, he later broke the head off his Oscar statue while practicing his golf swing. (During the Second World War, Oscar statues were made of plaster instead of gold, owing to wartime metal shortages.)

He returned to live in Dublin in 1959.

Fitzgerald has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for films at 6220 Hollywood Blvd. and for television at 7001 Hollywood Blvd.

Filmography

Source: "Barry Fitzgerald". IMDb. Retrieved 9 October 2013.

Radio appearances

[ Source: Wikipedia ]