Mother Dolores: Fellow former movie stars “live in my heart”

At the end of the press junket for the 1963 film Come Fly with Me, actress Dolores Hart’s limousine left her at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. It is there that she has lived in consecrated life for 61 years.

In the foreword to Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard—Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness and Lemmon, Mother 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 to pray about them to God, and for them.”

One of the actors she brought along was her “beloved” Karl Malden, the rich, often sauced, tycoon in Come Fly with Me, who romances Lois Nettleton, Hart’s fellow flight attendant. Add in Pamela Tiffin and the three (“Donna,” “Bergie” and “Brewster”) work the aisles crossing the Atlantic. During downtime, in Paris, Vienna and elsewhere in Austria and France, they look for “love and security,” as Richard DeNeut wrote in The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’s Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows, co-authored by Mother Dolores. 

Twenty-five years later Karl Malden would come calling with a new mission.

The two went way back. Malden had known her father, Bert Hicks, from Moss Hart’s Winged Victory, a U.S. Army Air Forces World War II Broadway play. It was made into a film that was Malden’s springboard to fame, though her father’s bit part barely survived the cutting room. Nine years later On the Waterfront “changed her world” given how Malden and his fellow actors “showed us truth,” Hart wrote. “I was riveted and inspired by Eva Marie’s performance. That was the kind of role I wanted to play someday.”

So she did, in 10 films including Lonelyhearts, starring Montgomery Clift. Eager for work, Clift’s character takes a lowly advice-giving columnist job but clashes with his derisive editor. Her wisecracking, smoking, drinking co-star, Maureen Stapleton, could not have been more different from polite, demure, savvy Dolores. But they became great friends, which Malden thought perfectly natural. They were both “mothers in capital letters. They both radiated trust—you could tell them anything. And they had taste in the people they chose to befriend,” he said.

Malden got to know Dolores better while making Come Fly with Me and observed her talent up-close, noting, along with her likeability, she could have risen as high as Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood. But her special generosity of spirit was a liability for that world. “(W)ith that kind of heart,” he said, “she didn’t belong in that environment” and “I love her for her decision.

Malden’s stellar career was capped by the presidency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1989-1992), after winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), in addition to other memorable performances also including General Omar Bradley in Patton (1969). While 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 her prayers.

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

With that historic invitation, she became the only nun to vote for Oscar nominees.

For the next seventeen years, during each Oscars awards season, Mother Dolores would pore through the nominated films, watch each and every screener, and weigh in on them, she told me, as one of the Academy's “wisdom figures.”  (We spoke on January 26, 2016, the day her close friend and co-author Dick DeNeut died.) Not only that, but she was delighted that her fellow contemplatives would take time from prayer to enjoy films with her -- though the only one they ever asked to see again was The King’s Speech.

Sadly, the brilliance of Malden and Rehme in inviting her back into the Academy, was
countermanded when, in January 2016, Mother Dolores and others who had not acted in films within a certain timeframe, were given a not-so-gracious un-ceremonial boot by the Academy in the wake of 'wokeness' convulsing Hollywood. At the time, Mother Dolores conceded that it “hurts,” not only for herself but for the sake of her Academy friends, who, she said, are “precious and have such value.”

But, as she presciently predicted after this vote to exclude them, when the Academy loses them, it “is going to destroy something of the essence of how people look at” it and “the quality” with which they associate it.  “It’s always been the star in the sky” among all the guilds. “And I think they are going to lose that,” Hart said.

Ah, yes. But she is still praying for Hollywood. And her prayers are potent! Especially given the peripheral neuropathy she suffers, a cross she has endured for over 25 years.