Agnes Doyle (1905-1992) From Nymagee to New York

Agnes Doyle in November 1930 while performing in Sydney in Op O’ Me Thumb. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.

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The Five Second version

During her lifetime, Agnes Doyle found her way from a remote regional town in outback New South Wales to the New York stage. She was a popular favourite with audiences in Australia in the 1920s and early 1930s, and almost continuously in work. Like many of her contemporaries, she left Australia to “try her luck.” She enjoyed some success on the US stage, especially in a long tour of Yes My Darling Daughter, but it appears her career never took off, as had been expected. She appeared on US TV in the early days of live-to-air programming in the mid 1950s. Sometime in the late 1950s she took on an important role for JC Williamsons, the Australian theatrical company, acting as their agent in New York. In this role she negotiated contracts and royalty arrangements. She died in New Jersey in 1992.

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In remote Australia

Agnes Doyle was born in Nymagee, a remote copper mining town over 600 kilometres north-west of Sydney, in late December 1905. Her father Michael was a copper smelter, her mother Ada a local woman – Agnes being the third of three children. Unfortunately, deep unhappiness marred her childhood. When Agnes was very young, her parents went through a bitter separation and divorce. Custody of Agnes and her older siblings was granted to Michael, who moved the family to nearby Cobar – a much larger mining town, in 1917.^[2]As with so many divorce documents of this time, a great deal was written but much remains unstated. See Divorce papers; Michael Doyle – Ada Doyle, 1912-1913, New South Wales State Archives The children all started performing even while living at Nymagee,^[3]Cobar Herald (NSW) 9 December 1913, P13 but it was at Cobar that Agnes and older sister Annie shone as a young singers.^[4]Western Age (NSW), 31 Jul 1917, P3 (See Note 1 below regarding her family circumstances)

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On stage in Australia

Agnes’s first notable success on stage was as a dancer in Sydney in August 1926. With dance partner Jack Lyons, she went on to win at state and then in Australia-wide amateur dance competitions.^[5]The Sun (Syd) 28 Nov 1926, P31. There is evidence that Agnes subsequently taught dancing at Melbourne’s Green Mill Dance Hall in the late 1920s. See Table Talk (Melb) 21 Mar 1929, P64 Unfortunately, where she learned to dance was never explained and what dramatic training she received is also unclear. But she had success on stage from a young age. In 1927 she was appearing in Leon Gordon‘s touring production of The Green Hat with Judith Anderson.^[6]The Sun (Syd) 3 Jul 1927, P38 By early 1929, she was touring Australian towns, now in a leading role in The Patsy, with Bert Bailey.

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Interviewed while touring in The Patsy in Western Australia in April 1929, the twenty-four year old Agnes said exactly what might be expected of very young Australian actors of the era – “Of course, I’m dying to get to London, and I’m hoping to go in December… I adore the stage… and have always been anxious to take up that life.” And in language also so typical of the time, the Perth newspaper added: “Though her association with the stage has been comparatively brief, Miss Doyle has already made solid progress towards the top of the stage ladder, and there seems little doubt that her talents, so obvious to those who have already seen the show, [The Patsy] combined with her ambition… will carry her further.”^[8]The Daily News (WA) 2 Apr 1929, P1 A Sydney Truth review of her role in the comedy This Thing Called Love in October 1930 was equally effusive. Her performance as the “inconsequential little idiot” Dolly Garrett, was “sheer joy”.^[9]Truth (Syd) 12 Oct 1930, P7

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The AusStage database entry for Agnes Doyle, which is not definitive, charts her busy schedule in the early 1930s, a reflection of her great popularity with Australian audiences. Her surviving JC Williamson contract also demonstrates how much “the Firm” valued her.^[10]JC Williamson’s was the large theatrical firm that dominated Australasia In late 1933, the agreement was to pay her a working salary of £12 per week and then retain her on £4 per work when not working. It was generous pay for a woman in her late twenties. By comparison, the Australian minimum wage at the time was about £3 and 7 shillings.^[11]Agnes Doyle contract with JC Williamsons. Dated 14 Dec 1933. Courtesy Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

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Her stage work brought her into contact with an eclectic mix of visiting and Australian performers, but notably there were a large number who would also try their luck overseas in the 1930s – John Wood and Campbell Copelin, Mona Barrie, Lois Green, Mary MacGregor, Dulcie Cherry and Isabel Mahon.

When The Patsy was revived again in 1932, Everyone’s magazine reported: “The play marks another individual success for Agnes Doyle… This girl is going [ahead] with leaps and bounds. She has a whimsicality and method of expression quite unusual, and in the part of Pat Harrington… [a] very quaint and also very appealing little personality…^[13]Everyones, Vol.13 No.651, 24 August 1932, P36

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By this time, her personal life had already been “remade.” She was now reported to be the daughter of “a well known grazier” and her hometown was the respectable and well established town of Bathurst.^[15]The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Oct 1934, P8 While this was a fiction, she had made some important society connections. Possibly while at Cobar she had befriended Patricia Penman ^[16]Western Age (Dubbo, NSW) 23 Sep 1931, P2 a budding actress now using the stage name Tisha (or Tuisha) Guille and the daughter of sportsman, mining engineer and colourful Sydney personality Arthur Percival (Percy) Penman. When Patricia married Jack Harris in 1933, Agnes was the single bridesmaid.^[17]Patricia lived a long life in New Zealand. Sir Jack Harris ran New Zealand import-export firm Bing Harris for many years

Perhaps her signature role was in Ivor Novello‘s comedy Fresh Fields. The play opened in Sydney in March 1934 after a long run in London. It probably appealed to Britons and Australians for different reasons. It concerned the Pidgeons, an Australian family, who had just sold their large hotel in Brisbane and who suddenly appear in the lives of two impoverished aristocratic London sisters (who cannot afford the upkeep on their Belgravia mansion). Agnes played Una Pidgeon, the “gauche clumsy” Australian daughter, who eventually wins over everyone and makes a success at court.^[18]Ivor Novello Fresh Fields synopsis (1935) The theme of brash, wealthy, but unsophisticated Australians (or Americans) versus the reserve and genteel poverty of an English family has been repeated so often it is immediately familiar to us today.

Move to the United States in 1935

Agnes arrived in the US on the SS Monterey in July 1935. Intriguingly, on US immigration documents she gave Arthur Penman as her guardian in Australia, and actor John Wood (who was then under contract to RKO) as her contact in the US. In early 1936 she played the role of Una again with the Margaret Anglin company production of Fresh Fields in New York. Reviews for her performance were positive – although the play itself may have been “too English” for a long run in the US. Variety thought it “overwritten” and a bit “too gabby.”^[19]Variety 12 Feb 1936 P62

Stories that she got the role while “on the way to London” may be true, but they also bear close similarity to accounts given for the US discoveries of other young Australians – Mary Maguire, Jocelyn Howarth (Constance Worth) and Mona Barrie – and it seems to have been a favourite Australian newspaper story. Another popular story was that of the movie studio offer. In Agnes’ case, following reports back home of the success of Fresh Fields on Broadway, came stories of studio contracts and movie offers in Hollywood.^[20]Daily Telegraph (Syd) 23 April 1936, P14 Whether she ever really entertained working in film is unknown, but The Australian Women’s Weekly claimed that talks with Twentieth Century-Fox had broken down because she was “asking too much.”^[21]The Australian Women’s Weekly 18 April 1936, P29

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Still presenting as a slight but vivacious young woman, she was well suited to playing the rebellious modern daughter in Yes, My Darling Daughter, first in New York in 1937 and then on tour through the US in 1938. It was a popular success.

The celebratory press reports of the 1930s regarding Australian actors overseas regularly included news of Agnes’s doings. Her travel to London in 1936 and again in 1938 when she stayed with Lord and Lady Waleran, news of being seen in the company of interesting people like Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, aviator Charles Kingsford-Smith and Hollywood newcomer Jocelyn Howarth (Constance Worth); all fitted in with the contemporary nationalistic belief that Australians could do anything.^[23]The Sun (Syd) 25 Jan 1938, P11 But there was little news about work on stage.

Australian sojourn 1945-6

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Unusually, Agnes Doyle returned to Australia in March 1945 – before the end of World War II, a difficult task and only possible at the time if one had guaranteed work at the destination and could get a berth on a ship. Yet Agnes did this and she stepped back into the Australian theatre scene with a role in the new comedy The Voice of the Turtle, with great ease. What had she been doing in New York for the previous six years was vaguely and briefly reported. When pressed, she spoke of her recent role in (a very short run of) That Old Devil.^[25]The Daily Telegraph (Syd) 8 Mar 1945, P16 She also mentioned radio plays for the B.B.C. and a play for NBC’s TV channel. She explained that she had worked for the British Ministry of War Transport for 18 months and had also helped raise $200,000 for American War Loan Bonds.^[26]The Sydney Morning Herald 8 Mar 1945, P5

Voice of the Turtle demonstrated that, whatever she had been doing, she had lost none of her skills as an actor. This contemporary adult comedy had a healthy two month run at Sydney’s Minerva Theatre and Agnes and Ron Randell, her co-star, were complimented for their performances.^[27]The Sydney Morning Herald 10 Apr 1945, P5 This was followed by a short run of Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Minerva.^[28]The Daily Telegraph (Syd)13 Aug 1945
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Career in the US after 1946

It took until April 1946 for Agnes to get a passage back to the US, and during the interim she lived with the Penman family in Sydney again. She had time to socialise with friends, support events for the services and comment on Australia’s limited post-war opportunities for actors. ^[29]She also thought income taxes were too high. Daily Telegraph (Syd) 7 Jan 1946, P9 Like Ron Randell, she declined to take up a role in Flying Foxes, a play with an Australian theme written by US serviceman Warren D Cheney, that was very publicly proposed for a New York launch in early 1946.^[30]See Daily Telegraph (Syd) 27 Jan 1946, P6. After US war service, Warren DeWitt Cheney, a maker of medical documentaries, went on to an interesting career as an abstract sculptor and later became a … Continue reading

One might wonder why Agnes Doyle, “Australia’s great little favourite,” returned to the US if her career there had slowed.^[31]JC Williamson Whistling in the Dark program, August 1932. Via National Library of Australia PROMPT collection However, as this writer has noted before, the choice for post-war Australian performers was stark. Actors could either stay – meaning they would continue to work for JC Williamsons, or on radio, or perhaps in a rare Australian film – there was, as yet, no television. Alternatively, they could try their luck overseas – where the opportunities seemed boundless.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to trace all of Agnes’s professional activities in the post-war world. She appeared in several live plays for US television in the mid-1950s and occasionally wrote for newspapers. She was living in apartment hotels in the 1940s – the Royalton and Algonquin in New York, both well known for hosting actors seeking work. However, her luck changed at the end of the 1950s, when she took on a new and very high profile role. JC Williamson’s employed her as their New York representative, to negotiate contracts and complex royalty agreements – for example for the hugely successful musical Camelot. Some of these survive in the archives of the Australian Performing Arts Collection in Melbourne.

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Agnes Doyle became a US citizen in February 1958. By that time she lived at the Martha Washington Hotel, a women’s-only residential hotel in New York.

Agnes died at the Actor’s Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey in August 1992. She never married, had no dependents and appears to have had no significant long-term partnership. A lonely life, perhaps. In 2024, the township of Nymagee still mines copper and sustains a population of about 100.

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Note 1 – Her family

There were great tragedies in Agnes’s life and these almost certainly coloured her willingness to discuss her past and probably influenced many of her decisions. In December 1920, her older sister Annie died in heartbreaking circumstances, apparently as a result of an attempt to induce an abortion.^[33]Truth (Syd), 2 Jan 1921, P9 Annie also left behind a very young son, and the grief for the Doyle family was palpable.^[34]The Daily Telegraph (Syd) 14 Dec 1920, P4^[35]The Sydney Morning Herald 14 Dec 1920, P7 Twenty-two years later, in early 1942, Agnes’s brother Dennis died in fighting during the Japanese invasion of Malaysia and Singapore. He left behind a family. It appears that Agnes was estranged from her mother for much of her life. Not so her father, who as late as 1950 was proudly providing commentary on her life.^[36]The Daily Mirror (Syd) 15 Feb 1950, P24 reported Patrick Doyle appearing on 2SM’s radio program “Fifty and Over”

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Nick Murphy
March 2024

References

Special thanks

• Claudia Funder – Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne
• Elaine Marriner – Marriner Theatre Archive, Melbourne

Collections

• Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne Australia
• The Marriner Theatre Archive, Melbourne
• New South Wales State Archives, Museums of History, New South Wales
• State Library of New South Wales
• State Library of Victoria
• Births, Deaths & Marriages, New South Wales
• Ancestry.com
• Newspapers.com
• National Library of Australia – Trove
• National Library of New Zealand – Papers Past

Text

• Warren D Cheney (1978) Don’t you play games with me!: How to identify and deal with games children play against you. Randolph-Harris, California.
• John McCallum (1979) Life with Googie. Heinemann, London
• Ivor Novello (1933) Fresh Fields: A comedy in Three Acts. (1936 Edition) Samuel French, New York.