Top 250 MoviesMost Popular MoviesTop 250 TV ShowsMost Popular TV ShowsMost Popular Video GamesMost Popular Music VideosMost Popular Podcasts
    Release CalendarBrowse Movies by GenreTop Box OfficeShowtimes & TicketsMovie NewsIndia Movie Spotlight
    What's on TV & StreamingBrowse TV Shows by GenreTV NewsIndia TV Spotlight
    What to WatchLatest TrailersIMDb OriginalsIMDb PicksIMDb Podcasts
    OscarsBest Picture WinnersBest Picture WinnersSundance Film FestivalIndependent Spirit AwardsBlack History MonthSXSWSTARmeter AwardsAwards CentralFestival CentralAll Events
    Born TodayMost Popular CelebsMost Popular CelebsCelebrity News
    Help CenterContributor ZonePolls
For Industry Professionals
  • All
  • Titles
  • TV Episodes
  • Celebs
  • Companies
  • Keywords
  • Advanced Search
Watchlist
Sign In
Sign In
New Customer? Create account
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
  • Biography
  • Awards
  • Trivia
IMDbPro

Eugene O'Neill(1888-1953)

  • Writer
IMDbProStarmeter
See rank
Eugene O'Neill
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.

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. (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). 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.)

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.

Eugene O'Neill died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1953. 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. 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). After 1934, he entered a cocoon, staying away from Broadway until after World War II, when the 1946 production of "The Iceman Cometh" debuted. The first production of "Iceman" failed, and O'Neill's reputation suffered, but the 1956 production of "Iceman" starring Jason Robards and directed by José Quintero was a great success, as was the posthumous production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night", which brought O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer. The two plays solidified his legend.
BornOctober 16, 1888
DiedNovember 27, 1953(65)
BornOctober 16, 1888
DiedNovember 27, 1953(65)
IMDbProStarmeter
See rank
  • Awards

Known for

Ed Harris and Jessica Lange in Long Day's Journey Into Night
Long Day's Journey Into Night
  • Writer
    Grigory Borisov and Nikolay Prusakov in Kali bazrobidan (1928)
    Kali bazrobidan
    • Writer
    • 1928
    Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Strange Interlude (1932)
    Strange Interlude
    5.6
    • Writer
    • 1932
    Wallace Beery, Eric Linden, and Cecilia Parker in Ah Wilderness! (1935)
    Ah Wilderness!
    6.9
    • Writer
    • 1935

    Credits

    Edit
    IMDbPro

    Writer

    • Long Day's Journey Into Night
      • Post-production
    • Three Dramas (2020)
      Three Dramas
    • Lång dags färd mot natt (2019)
      Lång dags färd mot natt
    • Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek in Long Day's Journey Into Night: Live (2017)
      Long Day's Journey Into Night: Live
    • The Web (2016)
      The Web
    • Digital Theatre: Long Day's Journey Into Night (2014)
      Digital Theatre: Long Day's Journey Into Night
    • Exorcism
    • Fifty Years on Stage (2013)
      Fifty Years on Stage
      • (segment Mourning Becomes Electra)
    • The Web (2011)
      The Web
    • To penthos tairiazei stin Ilektra (2011)
      To penthos tairiazei stin Ilektra
    • Pera ap' ton orizonta (1998)
      Pera ap' ton orizonta
    • TV teatar (1956)
      TV teatar
    • Mesíc pro smolare
    • Television Theater (1953)
      Television Theater
    • Great Performances (1971)
      Great Performances
    • To theatro tis Defteras (1970)
      To theatro tis Defteras

    Personal details

    Edit
      • October 16, 1888
      • New York City, New York, USA
      • November 27, 1953
      • Boston, Massachusetts, USA(cerebellar cortical atrophy)
      • Carlotta MontereyJuly 22, 1929 - November 27, 1953 (his death)
      • Oona Chaplin
      • James O'Neill
      • Christopher Chaplin(Grandchild)
    • Other works
      (10/29/37) Stage: Wrote "One Act Plays of the Sea", produced on Broadway, staged / directed by William Challee; "Bound East for Cardiff," one act, original drama; "In The Zone," one act, dramatic revival; "The Long Voyage Home," one act, original drama; "Moon of the Caribbees," one act, original drama. Lafayette Theatre (since 2005 the Williams Christian Methodist Episcopal church), Mew York (68 total performances).
    • Publicity listings
      • 4 Biographical Movies
      • 16 Print Biographies
      • 3 Portrayals
      • 7 Articles
      • 1 Magazine Cover Photo

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      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.".
    • Quotes
      Critics? I love every bone in their heads.
      • The Hairy Ape
        (1944)
        $30 .000 (film rights)

    Related news

    Contribute to this page

    Suggest an edit or add missing content
    • Learn more about contributing
    Edit page

    More to explore

    Recently viewed

    Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.
    Get the IMDb App
    • Get the IMDb App
    • Help
    • Site Index
    • IMDbPro
    • Box Office Mojo
    • IMDb Developer
    • Press Room
    • Advertising
    • Jobs
    • Conditions of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Your Ads Privacy Choices
    IMDb, an Amazon company

    © 1990-2023 by IMDb.com, Inc.