Mother Dolores’ former movie stars ‘live in my heart’

At the end of the press conference for the 1963 film Come fly with meActress Dolores Hart’s limousine left her at the Benedictine Regina Laudis Abbey in Bethlehem, Connecticut. She has lived there in consecrated life for 61 years.

In the preface to Oasis of faith: The souls behind the billboard – Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness and LemmonMother Dolores Hart, who turns 86 on October 20, wrote that when she “made this momentous decision” to leave Hollywood, “I took its actors and actresses with me to live in my heart and for them to God and to pray for them.” them.”

One of the actors she brought with her was her “beloved” Karl Malden, the rich, often drunk tycoon Come fly with mewho has a romance with Lois Nettleton, Hart’s flight attendant. Add Pamela Tiffin and the three (“Donna,” “Bergie,” and “Brewster”) work the passageways that cross the Atlantic. During their free time, they search for “love and security,” as Richard DeNeut wrote, in Paris, Vienna and elsewhere in Austria and France The ear of the heart: An Actress’s Journey from Hollywood to Sacred VowsCo-authored by Mother Dolores.

25 years later, Karl Malden came along with a new mission.

The two went way back. Malden knew her father, Bert Hicks, from Moss Hart Winged victorya US Army Air Forces Broadway play from World War II. This was made into a film that was Malden’s springboard to stardom, although her father’s small role barely survived the cutting room. Nine years later On the water “Changed her world,” considering how Malden and his fellow actors “showed us the truth,” Hart wrote. “I was fascinated and inspired by Eva Marie’s performance. That was the kind of role I wanted to play one day.”

She did, in 10 films among them Lonely heartsstarring Montgomery Clift. Clift’s character is hungry for work and takes a humble job as an advice columnist, but clashes with his snarky editor. Her funny, smoking, drinking co-star Maureen Stapleton couldn’t have been more different than the polite, reserved and smart Dolores. But they became good friends, which Malden thought was completely natural. They were both “Mothers with a capital letter.” They both exuded confidence – you could tell them anything. And they had taste for the people they befriended,” he said.

Malden got to know Dolores better while making it Come fly with me She observed her talent up close and realized that in addition to her likeability, she could have risen as high as Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood. But their particular generosity was a burden on this world. “With a heart like that,” he said, “she didn’t belong in this environment” and “I love her for her decision.”

Malden’s distinguished career was crowned by his presidency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1989-1992), after winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor A tram named Desire (1951), also starring General Omar Bradley in, among other memorable appearances Patton (1969). When he was president, he sent Mother Dolores a jacket with an AMPAS logo, “which I still wear over my habit,” she said.

Then, in 1998, it dawned on Malden and his AMPAS successor Robert Rehme that Mother Dolores could help them in Hollywood – beyond their prayers.

“We want to hear what you say and what you experience because you experienced it from a different place,” Malden told Hart, as she told me in a 2016 interview.