Current Biography
Volume 44 Number 7 July 1983
A triumphant New York
City debut in October 1982 in David Hare's play Plenty brought to the Canadian-born
actress Kate Nelligan the acclaim in American theatre circles that she had enjoyed for
nearly a decade in England. While still in her teens, she left her native Canada to seek
her fortune in the British theatre, and she was soon hailed as Great Britain's leading
young actress. Starring roles in several of Hare's plays have given rise to her reputation
as the leading interpreter of his dramas, and she has also been enthusiastically praised
for her performances in a variety of roles in plays ranging from Neil Simon to
Shakespeare. Although she has met with only modest success in motion pictures and on
television, she is determined to attain the stardom on the screen that she has achieved on
the stage. Kate Nelligan was born Patricia Colleen Nelligan in London, Ontario on
March 16, 1951, the second daughter of Patrick Joseph and Alice (Dier) Nelligan, who had
four other daughters and a son. Her family is fourth-generation Canadian, of Irish
Catholic extraction, and many of its members have remained in the working-class
neighborhood where they grew up. Patrick Nelligan supported the family as a millwright and
an employee of the local recreation department while Mrs. Nelligan worked herself through
university as a cleaning woman and eventually became an elementary school teacher. It was
her mother's ambition for the child who seemed to have the most potential that made
"Trish" Nelligan practice ballet and tap dancing while her sisters were occupied
with childhood pursuits. The pressure to succeed also led her to the Canadian junior
Finals in tennis. "I don't have very good memories," she told Val Ross, as
quoted in Maclean's (February 14, 1983). "I always felt isolated from the
others by my mother's definition of me. I don't know what she wanted me to be, but she
wanted me to excel."
At sixteen, after attending St. Martin's Catholic School in her home city, Miss Nelligan
obtained a scholarship to Glendon College, York University, in Downsview, Ontario, where
she majored at first in English but soon switched to the dramatic arts program, after
attending a rehearsal of a school play, "From that day forward, I never thought I
would do anything else," she told Leslie Bennetts of the New York Times
(October 27, 1982). "I remember feeling comfortable for the first time in my life.
…Acting satisfied something very deep in me, and I suppose it still does."
Although she had never before seen a play, she successfully auditioned for the role of
Gertrude in a college production of Hamlet. The quality of her performance prompted
her professor, Michael Gregory, to persuade her to apply for one of the two places
reserved for North Americans at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, the alma
mater of Lord Laurence Olivier and Dame Peggy Ashcroft. From the hundreds at the audition,
held at Yale University, she won the coveted place, and in September 1969, to her family's
dismay, she left the university without a degree and headed for England. Michael Gregory
later told Robert Miller of Maclean's (November 28,1977): "She is one of the
most talented people ever to come out of Canada. I could tell from the very beginning,
when she came to Glendon, that acting was a life option for her."
Plagued by illness and poverty during her first year at the Central School, Miss Nelligan
spent the next summer back in Canada, where she took a job at an Arthur Murray dance
studio while trying to find funds to continue her studies. "I sat down at the
typewriter," she told Bart Mills of the Guardian (April 10, 1974), "and
wrote to people I'd been told were interested in theatre: 'I am poor, you are rich, give
me money."' With the help of a Member of Parliament, she obtained $1,000 from the
Canadian government. A local millionaire, Richard Ivey, responding to her request for
funds, lent her the rest of what she needed to continue her studies, and she supplemented
that income by working as a waitress.
In 1972 Miss Nelligan completed her program at the Central School, where she had been
designated by fellow students the most talented of her class. Within three weeks she
signed on with the Bristol Old Vic company. Having decided that if she were to make her
career in England she would have to transform herself into an English lady, she changed
her name to Kate and mastered the British accent and manner to the point where Sheridan
Morley of Punch noted: "Kate always gave me the impression of an aristocratic
spikiness. One knew she came from the right side of the tracks." She gave her first
professional performance in the role of Corrie in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park
in August 1972, at Bristol's Little Theatre. Other roles that she played there and at the
Theatre Royal for the Bristol Old Vic included Sybil Chase in Private Lives, Stella
Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Hypatia in Misalliance, Pegeen
Mike in The Playboy of the Western World, Grace Harkaway in London Assurance,
and the title role in Lulu. "I was in seventeen plays at Bristol and in
fourteen of them I was bad," she told Bart Mills of the Guardian (April 10,
1974). "In Private Lives I was so bad I actually cried on stage. . . . It's so
agonizing to be bad in public." Nevertheless, her stint at Bristol, which in her
estimation gave her "five years' experience in twelve months," was an important
step in the advancement of her career.
An ingenue role, that of Leonora Biddulph in the thirteen-part BBC television series The
Onedin Line, gave Kate Nelligan her first taste of acting before the cameras, but she
felt very much miscast. "It's not easy for me to play a girl who's young and sweet
and never been kissed," she told Bart Mills. "I was having to hide everything
about myself...But…I learned how little you need to 'act' on television."
Kate Nelligan's London West End debut in David Hare's Knuckle, which opened at the
Comedy Theatre on March 4, 1974, brought her virtually unanimous raves and marked the
beginning of her long and happy professional association with the playwright. Her
performance as Jenny, a hardboiled, wisecracking nightclub manager, earned her thirteen
out of a possible eighteen votes in a Plays & Players critics' poll and netted
her the London Evening Standard's "most promising newcomer" award for
1974, Her portrayal evoked memories of the young Lauren Bacall.
Increasingly in demand, Kate Nelligan appeared both in National Theatre and Royal
Shakespeare Company productions in the mid-1970's. Notable among her early roles was that
of Ellie Dunn in the National Theatre's 1975 revival of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak
House. Robert Cushman, the drama critic of the London Observer (March 2, 1975),
enthused over the revival and, noting that Ellie's experience was "its
backbone," went on to say that "Kate Nelligan, initially ingenuous without being
mawkish, goes on to give a hearteningly full-blooded account of her disillusion, her rage,
and her metallic realism. This is a remarkably authentic performance." Some years
later, Miss Nelligan recalled the advice given to her by Sir John Gielgud who, after
watching her in Heartbreak House, told her not to cry so much on stage,
because "if you do, they won't."
Miss Nelligan's motion picture debut, in a small part in The Romantic Englishwoman
(New World Pictures, 1975), was barely noticed. But according to a reviewer for Variety
(June 2, 1976), she performed "touchingly in a promising feature bow" in the
role of Mercedes in a film version of The Count of Monte Cristo (ITC Films, 1976),
although the film itself was generally panned by critics. Canadian audiences had their
first chances to see Kate Nelligan perform when she was cast opposite Donald Sutherland,
in a 1976 CBC production of Bethune, as the wife of a Canadian doctor who was
involved in the Spanish Civil War and in revolutionary China. Reflecting the rave reviews
that Bethune received, Robert Miller commented in Maclean's (November 28,
1977) on the "grace and power" of Miss Nelligan's performance and called her a
"seasoned professional with surpassing talent."
When the National Theatre, early in 1977, put on Odon von Horvath's 1931 play Tales
from the Vienna Woods, Robert Cushman of the London Observer (January 30, 19771
advised Londoners to see it at their first opportunity, even though they might have to
brave crowds to do so. Of Kate Nelligan, starring as Marianne in this play, set in Vienna
in the early 1930's, Cushman raved: "Miss Nelligan-in bewilderment, anger, desolation
or defiance-is superb." More television appearances followed, including the lead in
the BBC series The Lady of the Camelias. Then, finally, she agreed to do something
she had been skirting for some time. She accepted the role of Rosalind in the Royal
Shakespeare Company's production of As You Like It, which opened at
Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1977. Since her schoolgirl portrayal of Gertrude, she has
"always avoided any Shakespeare, because so often he seems to swamp everybody,"
she told Sheridan Morley of the London Times (August 23, 1977).
"Actors, directors, designers, all get swallowed up in the sheer effort of getting
through his plays, and I swore I'd never get caught in that trap." Her fears were
unfounded, however, for, as Bryan Johnson of the Toronto Globe and Mail (January
24, 1978) observed, she "romped through the part with a freshness and enthusiasm
impossible to resist." While she was still playing Rosalind, in January 1978 British
television audiences were treated to her stellar performance in a BBC production of the
David Hare play Licking Hitler, described by Chris Dunkley in the London
Financial Times as "another Kate Nelligan tour de force."
Although she was the toast of Great Britain in the late 1970's, Kate Nelligan was somewhat
at odds with the press of her native land. She felt that she was unappreciated in Canada,
while Canadians thought it was they who were being snubbed. In England, there was some
concern over her movement back and forth between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the
National Theatre, which she dismissed with the comment: "I'm not a very company sort
of lady, and I like keeping my distance."
Kate Nelligan again joined forces with David Hare to triumph in the National Theatre
production of his Plenty, which he wrote especially for her. The play opened in
London's Lyttleton Theatre, under Hare's direction, on April 12, 1978, with Miss Nelligan
starring as Susan Traherne, a woman who, having fought as a teen-ager with the French
Resistance in World War II, grows increasingly frustrated in postwar England as she drifts
into an unhappy marriage and a conventional unproductive life that leads her to madness.
Her performance, as she shifted back and forth in age from teen-ager to mature woman,
dazzled the critics, and they could hardly find enough superlatives to describe it. Mel
Gussow of the New York Times (July 30, 1978) called Miss Nelligan Hare's
"symbiotic interpreter," while Kate Nelligan credited Hare with having
"shaped [her] standards for work." The performance earned her the London
Evening Standard's award as Great Britain's best actress of 1978.
Another film role, as Lucy in Universal Pictures' version of Dracula (1979), with
Frank Langella, brought mostly good notices to Kate Nelligan, including one from Gene
Siskel of the Chicago Tribune (July 13, 1979), who called her a "standout
performer." But the film itself evoked little enthusiasm and did nothing to enhance
her career. Nor did her appearances in the 1979 Canadian film Mr. Patman with James
Coburn, or in the BBC television production of another David Hare play, Dreams of
Leaving, make any significant impression on critics.
The lead in a BBC television version of Emile Zola's novel Therese Raquin provided
a significant challenge for Kate Nelligan. "The character is wonderful, and you
really get to chew the part," she told Peter S. Greenberg in an interview for Dial
(April 1981). "You name it, and Zola's got it: murder, death, incest, adultery. . . .
After the first reading I thought, you can't put stuff like this on camera. The actions
are too big; the emotions are too big; this is really an opera." The challenge was
met and Therese Raquin was successful enough to be transported to America, where it
was shown in the spring of 1981 as a three-part series on public television's Masterpiece
Theatre. The production brought Miss Nelligan her first real recognition in the United
States, although she had previously received some favorable notice when she appeared as
Isabella in a BBC production of Measure for Measure, also shown on public
television.
Anxious to make a success in motion pictures, Kate Nelligan landed a starring role in
United Artists'World War II thriller Eye of the Needle, which was filmed in England
in 1980. Although studio executives were reluctant to cast an actress little known in the
United States in the female lead, British director Richard Marquand knew of her work in
England and insisted on Miss Nelligan in the role of the British war bride who unwittingly
becomes involved with a Nazi spy, played by Donald Sutherland. Working again with
Sutherland was a happy experience for her. "I felt a little more relaxed about the
film because of Donald," she told Lynn Van Metre of the Chicago Tribune
(August 2, 1981). "He works harder than anybody I've ever worked with. . . . Working
with somebody who's as experienced as that, you make quantum leaps yourself. And to me,
that's the way to learn."
When Eye of the Needle was released in July 1981, critical opinion about the film
was mixed, but most reviewers were well pleased with Kate Nelligan's performance. The
critic for Variety (July 22, 1981) noted that she "expresses her tumultuous
feelings expertly"; Judith Crist in Saturday Review (July 1981) found her
"superb as the love-starved woman who turns heroine by instinct"; and David
Denby, in New York (August 10, 1981), enthused: "Beautiful Kate Nelligan . . .
is a dream of English womanhood" who "transcends what's conventional in the
plot." But in the view of the critic for the London Observer (December 20,
1981), Eye of the Needle, like her earlier films, failed to do justice to Miss
Nelligan's formidable talent, and she seemed to be "once again . . . ill-served by
the cinema."
Meanwhile, by early 1981 Kate Nelligan had moved to Los Angeles to further her film
career. But apart from the ABC television film Victims-in which she portrayed a
rape victim seeking revenge against her attacker with what John J. O'Connor of the New
York Times (January 11, 1982) described as "an almost chilling dignity"-her
career languished for about a year. "I've been offered a lot of bad roles that I
didn't want to do," she told Lynn Van Metre. "It's no problem to keep working,
but it is a problem to keep working at something you respect." But just as she had
bought some land near Calgary in Canada and was on the brink of abandoning acting, she
received two promising offers, one from Joseph Papp, asking her to star in a New York
Public Theater production of Plenty, and another offering her the lead in a new
Twentieth Century-Fox film, Without a Trace.
Filmed during the summer of 1982, Without a Trace was directed by Stanley R. Jaffe
and starred Kate Nelligan as Susan Selky, a Columbia University professor whose child,
played by Danny Corkill, disappears in an apparent kidnapping. But when the film was
released in February 1983 it failed to win unqualified praise. Rex Reed in the New York
Post (February 4, 1983) found it "a disagreeable and purposeless tearjerker,
" but felt that Kate Nelligan did "a mighty job of putting herself through a
show of agony." The critic for Variety (February 2, 1983) noted what he saw as
the actress' "fundamental humorlessness" and suggested that "a warm, cute
actress like Sally Field" might have been more appropriate for the lead role. On the
other hand, lack Kroll commented in Newsweek (February 7, 1983): "What makes Without
a Trace important is the powerful, intelligent, seismicsensitive performance of Kate
Nelligan"; and a critic for Playboy (May 1983) observed: "The
missing-child story misses, but Kate's great."
After completing the film, Miss Nelligan went to New York to begin rehearsals for Plenty.
She worked with David Hare to lighten the role and tried to encourage her American fellow
cast members who stood in awe of her English training. When the play opened at the Newman
Theater on October 21, 1982, Miss Nelligan, appearing on the New York stage for the first
time, immediately became the toast of the town. Raves were unanimous, with critics giving
her what a reporter for Time (January 10, 1983) called "almost embarrassingly
ecstatic reviews." When in January 1983 Plenty moved to Broadway's Plymouth
Theater, the acclaim continued, and Kate Nelligan was nominated for a Tony award as the
best actress of the season.
Pleased with the success of Plenty, Miss Nelligan nevertheless still had her sights
on a Hollywood film career and insisted on bowing out of the play when her contract
expired on March 27, 1983. "If you're going to have a film career, you've got to
establish yourself before your face falls apart,' she facetiously told Jerry Parker of Newsday
(January 30, 1983). "I figure I've got about six months." Joseph Papp has
indicated that he would like to star Kate Nelligan in a film version of Plenty.
Five feet six inches tall, long-legged, and weighing 106 pounds, Kate Nelligan conveys an
impression of aristocratic beauty with her elegant profile, hazel eyes, sensuous mouth,
and high cheekbones. Her intelligence and her determination to be a success have sometimes
been interpreted as coldness, and her insistence on privacy in her personal life has done
little to dispel that reaction. Although she has remained single, she does admit to having
a man in her life and has often said that she would like to have children. For recreation,
she enjoys traveling to Alberta on occasion to go trout fishing, and she likes to watch
football games, especially those of her favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. Her
leisure activities also include reading, gardening, and cooking. References: Guardian
pll Ap 10 '74 par; Macleans 90:50+ N 28 '77 pors, 96:46+ F 14 '83 pors; N
Y Times C pl9 0 27'82 par, New York P32+ 0 25 '82 pors; Plays & Players
22:16+ Mr '75 par; International Who's Who, 1982-83; Who's Who in
the Theatre (1981)
