Anita Sharp-Bolster was born on August 28, 1895 in Glenlohan, Ireland. She was an actress, known for The Lost Weekend (1945), Scarlet Street (1945) and Saboteur(1942). She died on June 1, 1985 in North Miami, Florida, USA.
Irish independent article in 2012.
With all things John Ford being celebrated, Carol Hunt recalls one of his finest actors
It was not long after he and his wife had returned home to Cork from working in the United States that Desmond Sharp-Bolster received a rather odd request from Hollywood — asking for information about his now deceased Aunt Anita’s “Communist affiliations”. He was nonplussed.
“I knew her very well,” he told me last week, “but I had heard nothing about any socialist leanings.” Nor had he realised that his aunt — a Cork-born actress far better known in Hollywood and New York than her native Ireland — had served as a nurse on the Aragon front in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
Soon afterwards, though, while going through some papers, Desmond discovered this information on a playbill for a production of Pygmalion on Broadway, which Anita had starred in with Raymond Massey and Gertrude Lawrence, among others.
“We never really got into politics,” said Desmond, “but as I understand it, Hemingway and that Bohemian crowd, while assisting the Communists, were really there to combat Fascism.” (Co-incidentally, Desmond’s wife’s family published all of Hemingway’s books.)
Desmond is well aware, though, of the extraordinary life led by his aunt and how, as an Irish artist, Anita Sharp-Bolster had a comprehensive impact on arts and culture worldwide for many years — yet still she seems to have been somewhat overlooked in her home country.
Born in 1895 to an Anglo-Irish family in Glenlohane, Kanturk, Co Cork, Alice (Anita) Sharp-Bolster amassed an extraordinary portfolio of work during her 90 years.
“I know of no other Irish actor or actress of that era with such an extensive participation in both stage and film,” is the opinion of her nephew. Or any era, one would have to add.
Like many Irish actors who would go on to Hollywood and work extensively with John (Feeney) Ford, Anita’s acting career began with the Abbey Players, in a play called The Mineral Waters.
Her talent must have been quickly spotted as she then travelled on to London, got to New York in 1938 and finally made her screen debut in Hollywood in 1941. She went on to run the The Gate Theatre in California in association with Peter Godfrey. Some of her better known films were Going My Way, The Lost Weekend, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kitty, The Perfect Woman, Botany Bay, The Thin Man Goes Home and The Two Mrs Carrolls. In her lifetime, she worked with such well-known names as Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, John Ford, of course, and later on, Angela Lansbury.
One Hollywood screen biography blurb says that: “Bolster became one of the busiest character actresses of the 1940s.”
It seems extraordinary that so many of us — especially those of us with interests in Irish film and theatre — have heard so little, if anything, about this Cork woman’s highly successful and very diverse career.
Considering if his aunt may have had what we call a ‘risque life’, Desmond laughs and says he wouldn’t have thought so: “She was always such a breath of fresh air when she came home, which she did regularly and she received total support from her family.”
Anita was also responsible for her nephew’s American schooling and connections. “She was at a cocktail party in Thirties New York when she overheard a couple saying that they were going to Ireland and were interested in fox-hunting.”
She immediately introduced herself and told them that her brother and sister-in-law took in paying guests in Cork and that they could organise riding to hounds with them.” So they came, they stayed, became great friends and then godparents to the young Desmond who was born in 1939.
Consequently in 1953, after the war, Desmond went to stay with them and was schooled where they lived, two hours north of New York.
She bought land here in Schull and was thinking of retiring here,” says Desmond. “But then she went off back to work in the States, kept on working and finally moved to Florida.”
She died there in 1985; an extraordinary Irish woman. As her nephew noted: “While there are certainly Irish actors and actresses that have made a name for themselves in one or two movies, it is people like John Ford and Anita that have enabled Ireland to ‘punch above its weight’ on the international scene
The comedian and satirist Mort Sahl, who has died aged 94, was a combination of Lenny Bruce and Bob Hope – with a little Will Rogers thrown in. Like Bruce, Sahl was a product of the 1950s. Like Hope, he was as much a reporter and commentator on the events of the day as a morning newspaper. And like Rogers, who took the US by the heartstrings during the days of the Great Depression, he would walk on stage with one of those papers in his hand and proceed to take a famous figure to task.
Rogers just made jokes about the people in the news, but Sahl specialised in demolishing them. Different from Hope, who employed an army of ghostwriters, Sahl wrote all his own material – and not just for himself; for a while he was President John F Kennedy’s principal joke writer. To much surprise, he later became a close friend of Ronald Reagan.
Unlike Bruce, who used to say that Sahl was his inspiration, he did not shock with obscenities and the drug culture seemed to be foreign to him. Nevertheless, he had the effect of a heat-seeking missile on his targets. When American politicians were in trouble, they had to take cover whenever Sahl appeared on stage or on a television talk show. Kennedy said he liked Sahl because he admired a man who was “in relentless pursuit of everybody”.
Born in Montreal, he was the son of Harry Sahl, a Jewish-American court reporter who had gone to Canada to write plays and go into business. When this failed, he took his wife, Dorothy, and son, Morton, back to the US and became an administrator for the FBI. The younger Sahl would later become the subject of a considerable FBI file about his suspected communist leanings. Nothing stuck, however, and his political affiliations were never clear.
At school in Los Angeles, he was a member of the officer cadet corps. He was drafted into the US air force soon after the second world war and stationed in Alaska, where he worked on the base newspaper. He then went to the University of Southern California to take a degree in city management. Before long, his only connection with that worthy subject would be lambasting it from the stage of a smoke-filled club or a small theatre – although usually his targets were larger.
He almost starved trying to sell his writing before he arrived at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco in the early 50s, but by the end of the decade and in the early 60s, he was the favourite nightclub entertainer in the more sophisticated parts of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. What many of the well-heeled and well-known patrons liked about him was that he had no more respect for the leftwing than for the establishment on the right.
He was one of the first satirical comedians to make LP records and sell them, the first being At Sunset, recorded in 1955. He became such an influential figure that Time magazine devoted one of its celebrated cover features to him, describing him as “Will Rogers with fangs”. Sahl also wrote screenplays and occasionally appeared in films himself, including Johnny Cool (1963), Inside the Third Reich (1982) and Nothing Lasts Forever (1984).
For a while in the 60s, his fame and appeal began to wane, but Sahl regarded it as his duty to continue to attack whatever he believed needed attacking. The assassination of Kennedy in 1963 was a landmark: he regarded the president’s killing as he would the death of a close relative. When the Warren commission declared that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, Sahl took it as a personal affront and campaigned to have the findings reversed.
The Vietnam war was perfect grist for the mill of his talent; people began to want to hear what he said about it, and he guested again on the top talk shows. But his stage work faded until the late 80s – when, for the first time, he had a four-week run at a Broadway theatre. He came out on to a bare stage, as he always did, in a pair of slacks and a V-neck sweater. But there was the inevitable folded newspaper and the comment on the world around him.
“Washington couldn’t tell a lie,” he said, “Nixon couldn’t tell the truth and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.” Although he was a frequent guest at the White House during the Reagan years, the president remained a target.
He would skewer politicians of all parties, latterly including Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Asked what his principal philosophy was, he would say “I am allergic to majorities” and he was known for the stage catchphrase: “Are there any groups I haven’t offended?” In 2004 he described himself as “a disturber”.
When he talked about retirement, he would say: “I’d be glad to relinquish the reins and go on and do something useful … but I can’t seem to clean up the town.” He carried on performing once a week until prevented by the pandemic.
The New York Post critic Clive Barnes once wrote of Sahl: “The real joy of the man, and his show, is the quickness of his mind and his wonderful sense of nonsense. Forget that the man is clever. Merely think of him as the funniest guy in town.”
Sahl was married and divorced four times. His son, Mort Jr, from his second marriage, to China Lee, died in 1996.
Morton Lyon Sahl, comedian, born 11 May 1927; died 26 October 2021