Before the opening curtain of A Moon for the Misbegotten on Broadway, Director Jose Quintero hugged Colleen Dewhurst for good luck. "Good luck?" the actress asked indignantly. "You think that after 16 years of rehearsing this play I am going to fumble now " Indeed, Dewhurst first played the role of Josie Hogan (an Irish- American farmer's daughter who attempts to conceal her clumsy body and a troublesome virginity in a smokescreen of Gaelic bluster and barroom humor) in Quintero's 1957 production at Spoleto and again at Buffalo's Studio Arena Theater in 1965. Nevertheless, Jose, Colleen and Leading Man Jason Robards were unprepared for the thunderous reception that greeted this Moon.
Good Notices. "I want to stand in front of the audience and shout 'I am so happy!' " exults Dewhurst. "It seems to me that I have spent all my life getting good notices. Then the producer visits us backstage"—in a split second her gray-green eyes flash from fawnlike softness to New England granite—"and the next thing we know everybody is crying because we can't stay open."
In 27 years of openings and closings, though, Dewhurst has won a reputation as one of the stage's most lavishly gifted actresses (Hollywood has never especially taken to her, nor she to it). Among her collection of accolades are a Drama Desk award for her portrayal of the mother in Mourning Becomes Electro (1972), an Obie for Abbie Putnam in Desire Under the Elms (1963), a Tony for her widowed mother in All the Way Home (1961). Moon, however, is her first commercial smash. After the opening night, Producer Richard Horner assured the cast: "You can unpack your bags; you are not going on the road. We are staying in New York."
A tall handsome woman with a voluptuous figure, Dewhurst is well suited to O'Neill's full-blooded Earth Mother conception of women. She believes in acting from the gut rather than the brain. "I love to see people's intelligence tripped up by their emotional drive," she says. "I can't play the human goodies, the perfect miss going through God's trials because it was God's will. I would be in a rage." Says Quintero: "She draws her strength from the bottoms of her feet —she loves to run barefooted. And Colleen is endowed with one of the great faces in the world; you can read her whole history, from the time she was a girl through womanhood."
The daughter of a hockey player, Dewhurst was born in Montreal. When she was seven, the family moved to the first in a succession of towns in the Midwestern U.S. Her mother, a Christian Scientist, "brought me up to be a person. It never entered her mind to raise a daughter just to be married." Dewhurst no longer practices the faith—she is a chain-smoker and enjoys white wine —but she insists that "everything I like about myself comes from the religion, and when I get in a bad bind, my mind goes back to it."