• Kathleen Ryan was born in Dublin in 1922.   Her parents owned the famous Monument Dairies  in the city.   Regarded as one of the beauties of her day, she was captured on portrait by Louis le Brocquy in 1941.   This portrait now hangs in the Ulster Museum.   She was cast opposite James Mason in her first film “Odd Man Out” directed by Carol Reed in 1947.   This film is now regarded as a masterpiece.   She played opposite the leading actors of the time including Stewart Granger, Rock Hudson and John Gregson.   In 1950 she went to Hollywood to make her only American movie “The Sound of Fury”.   Her last film was in 1957 and she died in 1985.

“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”:

Tall, copper-haired Irish actress with lovely complexion and attractively soft spoken voice.   She was mostly typed as flowing-haired colleens after a brilliant success in the leading female role of her first film.    Consequently, she made too few films and despite a couple of invitations to Hollywood, her career petered out.

An interesting article on Kathleen Ryan can be found online here.

Kathleen Ryan (Wikipedia).

Kathleen Ryan was born in Dublin, Ireland of Tipperary parentage and appeared in British and Hollywood films between 1947 and 1957.

Kathleen Ryan was one of the eight children of Séamus Ryan, a member of Seanad Éireann and his wife Agnes Ryan née Harding who came from Kilfeacle and Solohead respectively in County Tipperary and who were Republican activists during the Irish War of Independence. They opened a shop in Parnell Street, Dublin in the 1920s which was the first of 36 outlets which were known as “The Monument Creameries”

. The family lived at Burton Hall, near Leopardstown Racecourse in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock. Her brother was John Ryan, an artist and man of letters in bohemian Dublin of the 1940s and 50’s, who was a friend and benefactor of a number of struggling writers in the post-war era, such as Patrick Kavanagh. He started and edited a short-lived literary magazine entitled Envoy. Among her other siblings were Fr. Vincent (Séamus) (1930–2005), a Benedictine priest at Glenstal Abbey, Sister Íde of the Convent of The Sacred Heart, Mount Anville, Dublin, Oonagh (who married the Irish artist Patrick Swift), Cora who married the politician, Seán Dunne, T.D. When Kathleen was an undergraduate at University College Dublin, she was introduced to the future Dr. Dermod Devane of Limerick. They were married in the society wedding of 1944 and the couple had three children, but the marriage was annulled in 1958.

As one of Ireland’s great beauties of her time, she was the subject of one of Louis le Brocquy‘s most striking portraits, Girl in White, which he painted in 1941 and entered in the RHA exhibition of that year. The portrait (oil on canvas) is in the Ulster Museum collection. She died in Dublin, from a lung ailment aged 63 and was buried with her parents beneath an imposing statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, near the Republican Plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

Dictionary of Irish Biography:

Kathleen

Contributed by

Clavin, Terry

Ryan, Kathleen (1922–85), actress, was born on 8 September 1922 above her parents’ shop on Camden Street, Dublin, the first of eight children of James (Seamus) Ryan (qv) and his wife Agnes Ryan (qv) (née Harding). Originally from Tipperary, her parents owned and managed a thriving chain of groceries called the Monument Creamery, amassing over thirty outlets throughout the city. Her father was also prominent within the Fianna Fáil party, serving as a senator up to his untimely death in 1933.

Kathleen grew up in increasingly prosperous surrounds, as the family moved first to a red-bricked residence in Rathgar in the 1920s and then into a mansion in Sandyford in 1938. At the age of six she was sent to Bruff boarding school in Co. Limerick and later attended Mount Anville college in Dublin before being sent to a finishing school in Paris. Following the German conquest of France in 1940, she returned home and studied for a B.Comm.degree in UCD. Endowed with fine, alabaster features and a cascade of reddish auburn hair, she was a great beauty and the subject in 1941 of a much-admired portrait by Louis Le Brocquy (1916–2012), ‘Girl in white’, now in the National Museums Northern Ireland.

Appearing on stage from 1940, she first performed at the Peacock theatre opposite Dan O’Herlihy (qv) in the UCD Players’ production of Thomas Dekker’s ‘The shoemaker’s holiday’. She lost interest in pursuing a degree, eventually dropping out of college, but not before meeting Dermod Devane, a medical student from Limerick. They were considered the most attractive couple in UCD, if not Ireland, and their marriage in 1944 was a major society event. They had three children and lived in Ballinacurra, Co. Limerick.

She continued as a professional theatre actress, but her experience was still quite limited when in 1946 she was chosen (on O’Herlihy’s recommendation) as the female lead in the Carol Reed-directed film Odd man out. Despite never having performed in the Abbey theatre, she vaulted over a host of Abbey regulars populating the supporting cast, fuelling suspicions that her casting owed more to her looks and perhaps her family’s wealth than to acting ability. Depicting the final hours of a wounded IRA gunman, played by James Mason, the film surely resonated with her mother Agnes who had harboured and assisted IRA fugitives during the Anglo–Irish war of 1919–21. Kathleen’s role as Mason’s girlfriend conspicuously failed to convey the liveliness and wit of her true personality. Acting almost solely through her dolefully expressive eyes, she was obliged to maintain a downcast and dour countenance throughout, which, however, conferred an implacability that added to the violent denouement. Released in 1947, Odd man out was a critical and commercial success, and is considered a noir classic.

Thereafter, the Rank Organisation, the biggest British film company, built her up as one of its leading starlets. From 1947 to 1957 she appeared in a further eleven British (mainly) and American films, starring alongside Rock Hudson, Dirk Bogarde and Stewart Granger. Three of these films dealt with Irish subjects – Captain Boycott (1947), Captain Lightfoot (1955) andJacqueline (1956). While Odd man out enabled her to pursue a movie career, it had the effect of restricting her to ‘mournful Dark Rosaleen parts’ (Ní Riain, 98), which was perhaps also due to a limited acting range. Her role in Esther Waters (1948) gave her an opportunity to overcome this typecasting, which she failed to exploit, suffering from poor directing and an over-earnest production. She slipped down the billing and a seven-film contract signed with a Hollywood studio in 1952 produced only two roles.

Her career was further hindered by personal problems. In 1954, after being involved in a car accident near Ballinacurra in which a travelling salesman lost a leg, she was obliged to pay £7,000 in compensation by the civil courts. A serious accident, presumably the same one, also permanently affected her health. Her later films were of a poor standard and her movie career petered out in 1958. So too did her marriage. She returned to Dublin to live with family, continuing thereafter to be dogged by ill health, which she bore stoically while occasionally engaging in self-reproachful reminiscences. Living latterly in Killiney, Co. Dublin, she died of lung cancer in Baggot Street hospital, Dublin, on 11 December 1985, and was buried with her parents in Glasnevin cemetery.

Sources

Sunday Independent, 31 July 1949; 3 July 2011; Limerick Leader, 4 Sept. 1954; Ir. Times, 26 Oct. 1955; 12, 18 Dec. 1985; Ir. Independent, 12 Dec. 1985; Íde Ní Riain, The life and times of Mrs A. V. Ryan (née Agnes Harding) of the Monument Creameries (1986); Steve Brennan and Bernadette O’Neill, Emeralds in Tinseltown: the Irish in Hollywood (2007), 154; ‘Not quite a femme fatale’, Gareth’s Movie Diary (18 Feb. 2011), garethsmovies.blogspot.co.uk; Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com (internet material accessed Nov. 2013)

Article on Kathleen Ryan by Liam Collins in Belfast Telegraph in Jan 2020.

She was feted at film premieres, mixed with Hollywood’s leading men, was the subject of a celebrated Louis le Brocquy portrait and appeared set for the gilded life of a film superstar. But when Kathleen Ryan died in December 1985 at the age of 63 she was a forgotten woman.

Her career behind her, she was a familiar figure around Grafton Street in Dublin where her younger brother John owned The Bailey pub and she was living with a raffish newspaper columnist when she died of a lung infection at Baggot Street hospital.

The once celebrated beauty seems to have been haunted by ‘what might have been’ – what one of her sisters called the “tragedy” of her promising Hollywood career, a ‘hit-and-run’ accident in which a man lost his leg and the break-up of her marriage to a leading Limerick doctor.

Yet Kathleen Ryan lives on, not as a glamorous Hollywood star but as Kathleen Sullivan in the gritty thriller Odd Man Out, a film that influenced famous directors and actors and is regarded by aficionados as a cinema classic. It was where it all started with such promise when she was cast as the heroine in Carol Reed’s 1947 film noir, opposite James Mason.

His hard-edged part as the wounded IRA man fighting for survival in a dark world of intrigue and betrayal transformed him from a very English ‘character’ actor to a major Hollywood star.

It was a role that defined his career, but sadly for Kathleen Ryan, although she went on to play opposite Rock Hudson, Dirk Bogarde and Stewart Granger, all leading Hollywood men of the time, she would never garner such fame again.

“The tragedy of her career was that she was forever given mournful ‘Dark Rosaleen’ parts that did not suit her,” said Ide Ni Riain, about her high-spirited sister.

Kathleen Ryan was born on September 8, 1922, above her mother’s shop in Camden Street, Dublin.

It seemed like humble beginnings, but her parents were a formidable partnership. Her mother, Agnes V Ryan, the founder of the Monument Creamery chain of shops, and her father Seamus, a friend of Eamon de Valera, who would later become a founder of Fianna Fail and a senator.

In the decade that followed Kathleen’s birth her mother would build a retail empire of 28 shops, cafes and a bakery in central Dublin and the suburbs, making her probably one of the wealthiest women in the city and one of the few females to found and run a major enterprise in that era.

Her day started when her uniformed chauffeur Eddie Keogh picked her up in her blue Daimler to begin a tour of the shops. It was interrupted by attendance at 10 o’clock mass in Whitefriar Street Church, after which the inspection would resume.

She talked to her ‘girls’, found out what was selling and what wasn’t, and was constantly on the hunt for new premises to sell her own brand of luxury, fresh produce sourced from suppliers in the Golden Vale.

With busy careers and a growing family the eldest, Kathleen, was sent to boarding school in Bruff, Co Limerick, at the age of six. She stayed there until the sudden death of her father at home in Rathgar in 1933. For his services to Fianna Fail he was honoured with a state funeral and thousands of people lined the streets of Dublin to pay tribute as his cortege made its way up O’Connell Street.

But even as they did so, rumours circulated in business circles that his wife’s chain of grocery stores was bankrolled by de Valera and would collapse within weeks.

Defiantly she bought herself a new car and moved her brood of eight children to the stately Burton Hall estate near Leopardstown racecourse in south Co Dublin, which she filled with antique furniture and her collection of Jack B Yeats paintings.

The girls were enrolled in Mount Anville. After a stint in ‘finishing’ school in Paris, Kathleen went to UCD to study for a BComm.

At the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition of 1941 the Louis le Brocquy portrait of the 19-year-old beauty Girl in White was the sensation of the show and is now in the Ulster Museum in Belfast. Dressed in a beautiful white gown and painted in profile she looks the picture of elegance and wealth.

On July 19, 1944, dressed in a “cloth of gold”, she married Dermod J Devane, a dashing young doctor from Limerick who she met in UCD. After their wedding in Foxrock Church her mother spared no expense throwing a lavish reception in the grounds of Burton Hall. Tanaiste Sean T O’Kelly and ministers Eoin Ryan, Frank Aiken, Sean McEntee, PJ Rutledge and their wives mixed with writers, artists, business people and society figures.

Kathleen had “dropped out” of university and with her new husband moved to Limerick. They lived in a red-bricked house in Ballincurra and he operated a private practice in Pery Square in the city. She was nursing their first child when she got a call from the Rank Organisation to play opposite James Mason in Odd Man Out – a classic noir film set in an unnamed city in which an IRA raid goes wrong and during an exchange of gunfire a policeman is killed and Johnny McQueen, Mason’s character, is wounded.

Filmed on the gritty streets of Belfast it didn’t take much for city and story to become entwined. The cast was littered with high-profile Irish actors, many of them from the Abbey Theatre – Cyril Cusack, FJ McCormick, Denis O’Dea, WG Fay, Maureen Delaney and Dan O’Herlihy among them. It was released in London in February 1947 to sensational reviews.

‘Odd Man Out Challenges Hollywood’, read the Irish Independent headline. “Kathleen Ryan, the heroine, is a real person who plays her part with sincerity and never vulgarises it by self-conscious glamour,” added the reviewer.

Because of weeks of snow and ice that brought Ireland to a standstill the film didn’t open in the Royal Theatre in Dublin until early March 1947. For six days beforehand the Irish press ran stills from the film and its reviewer wrote: “Kathleen Ryan has justified the English rave about her possibilities.” An American reviewer described her as “beautiful as the girl, cool, statuesque and stoical, but it is difficult to fathom her thoughts”.

After starring roles in Captain Boycott and Esther Waters she left her family for Hollywood in 1952, accompanied by her sister Cora. She was clearly following in the footsteps of Maureen O’Hara and Mia Farrow’s mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, who were both older than her but had the same fresh Irish good looks. But a seven-film contract produced only two roles and she returned to Ireland to film Captain Lightfoot, starring Rock Hudson as a highwayman, although she had slipped down the billing with Barbara Rush playing the leading lady.

As she was preparing for the role, Kathleen made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

On May 7, 1953, Peter Kelliher, a shopkeeper of Moyderwell, Tralee, Co Kerry, was on his way home from a business trip to Dublin. He stopped his 1951 Bedford van at McNamara’s petrol station outside Limerick at about 8.30pm to put water into the radiator from a red Esso can. As he was doing so a green Hillman car, registration ZU 1158, drove into the petrol station, skidded in a circle, striking him in the process, before righting itself and proceeding back towards Ballincurra.

“They’ve killed my boy,” wailed Kelliher’s mother Norah who was sitting with her sister in the stationary van. ‘They’ hadn’t, but he did suffer traumatic injuries to his leg which had to be amputated.

When Inspector T Griffin, alerted by witnesses, called to the Devane household at No 2 Querrin Villas, Ballinacurra, at 9.35pm the Hillman was parked outside and there was red paint from Mr Kelliher’s can streaked along the side. The garda spoke to Kathleen Ryan and said she told him she “couldn’t account for the damage to her car”. She declined to give a statement but later sent one via her solicitor.

She said she had been collecting parcels from the Dublin bus in Limerick, it had been raining and on her way home the car had gone into a skid at Pounds Cross “but she didn’t believe she had hit anything”. She said she got a terrible shock and drove home because of it, making no attempt to hide the car.

She was charged with dangerous driving at Limerick City Court. But the case was adjourned for three months to allow the mother-of-three to take her role in the film Captain Lightfoot, a period drama shot in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, and Clogherhead, Co Louth.

When the dangerous driving case was eventually heard, on September 4, 1954, Kathleen (Ryan) Devane (31) sat at the back of the court wearing a long dark coat and what one reporter called “a tidy hat”.

Because of her status as a film star the courtroom in Limerick city was packed with reporters who spilled off the press benches on to the tables reserved for legal representatives.

In a spirited defence, during which she was not called to give evidence, her barrister told Judge Gleeson “there was nothing sinister” about her leaving the scene.

After hearing the evidence the judge agreed. “The skid and unfortunate accident was not caused by anything in the driver’s view,” he concluded. “It was clear she made no attempt to avoid detection or run away,” he also ruled, dismissing the charges of dangerous and careless driving.

Rather confusingly he then fined her £5 for not remaining at the scene.

The following October after a brief hearing in the High Court in Dublin during which Ryan’s insurers admitted liability, Mr Kelliher, who attended on crutches, was awarded £7,000 in damages.

The court was told that he had his leg amputated below the knee as a result of the accident and he might have to have a further operation.

Now over 30, and her days as a ‘leading lady’ over, Kathleen Ryan appeared in a series of unremarkable films in the years that followed, including Jacqueline in 1956, another gritty Belfast-based drama. But nothing was to replicate the success of Odd Man Out, and her career petered out. She didn’t have the Abbey Theatre training of many of her contemporaries and gradually faded from the scene.

Her marriage was annulled in 1958, not something that was talked about at the time.

She moved back to live with her mother in The Priory in Monkstown, Co Dublin, before taking a flat in Ashley, a large Victorian house on Clyde Road. With her brother John she was appointed a director of the Monument Creamery, but by then the family business was struggling and would go into voluntary liquidation in 1961.

In the early 1960s she moved to Killiney with Niall Desmond Lawlor, an Old Belvedere boy, teacher, army man and latterly a journalist with the Irish Independent and author of a column in the paper signed Tatler 11. The couple were well known in the pubs off Grafton Street, mixing with artists and writers.

Her death notice of December 11, 1985, was simple and unadorned: “Kathleen Devane (nee Ryan) of No 10 Cluny Grove, Killiney, Dublin, mourned by her son, daughters, relatives and friends.” Her removal and funeral took place at Our Lady of Victories in Sallynoggin, Co Dublin.

There was no indication, except to those ‘in the know’ of her famous mother, her glamorous early life or her glittering film career.

By then Ireland had changed utterly and people were more interested in looking forward than back and all that remains to her memory is a black and white film and a bronze plaque in gaelic on the family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.

Belfast Telegraph