Irene Dailey, a late-blooming actress perhaps best known for her roles in
television soap operas and for her portrayal of the quick-witted, sensitive
mother, Nettie Cleary, in the 1964 Tony
Award-winning drama “The Subject Was Roses,” died on Sept. 24 in Santa Rosa,
Calif. She was 88 and lived in Guerneville, Calif.
The cause was colon cancer, her friend Arleen Lorrance said.
From 1974 to 1986, and then again from 1988 to 1994, Miss Dailey played Liz
Matthews in “Another World” — an upper-class-bred matriarch of a middle-class
family dealing with the convolutions of life in the fictional town of Bay City.
For that role, Miss Dailey won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding actress in
1979.
For a year, in 1969, Miss Dailey played a role in the crime-mystery soap
opera “The Edge of Night.” Her many other television credits included
appearances on shows like “Ben Casey,” “Dr. Kildare,” “The Twilight Zone” and
“The Defenders.” Miss Dailey’s film credits include roles in “No Way to Treat a
Lady,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “The Amityville Horror.”
It was only after appearing in a long series of Broadway flops that, in 1964,
Miss Dailey received critical acclaim in the United States. It was for her
portrayal of the mother in Frank D. Gilroy’s three-character drama, “The Subject
Was Roses.” The play dealt with an incompatible couple’s love for their
21-year-old son (with Jack
Albertson as the father and Martin
Sheen as the son) after the son returns after three years in the Army.
“Miss Dailey’s Nettie is a luminous creation,” Howard Taubman wrote in The
New York Times. “She can suggest hurt and desiccation with a stricken glance.
Wearing a plain hat and coat and holding her purse, she can turn to walk out of
her apartment so that her back conveys her utter defeat and despair.”
Miss Dailey was born in New York City on Sept. 12, 1920, the daughter of
Daniel and Helen Ryan Dailey. Her father was the manager of the Roosevelt Hotel
in Manhattan. Her brother Dan Dailey gained fame as a song-and-dance man and
Hollywood actor.
At 8, Irene Dailey was dancing in vaudeville, and at 18 she was working in
summer stock. With consistent bad luck, she kept winning parts in what she once
said were 13 of Broadway’s worst shows. “Miss Lonelyhearts,” for example, had a
nine-day run.
Miss Dailey ran a lampshade store and worked as a waitress while making the
Broadway rounds. Then, in 1960, she tried her luck in London. She was the 47th
actress to try out for the lead in “Tomorrow — With Pictures,” about an American
woman trying to take over a British newspaper empire. She got the part and drew
rave reviews.
“Every plummy-voiced English rose of an imitation actress should be dragged
to see Miss Dailey,” The Daily Express critic wrote. “She sweats love, breathes
hate, weeps desire.”
In an interview with Time magazine at the time, Miss Dailey said: “I shall be
40 in September. I have nothing, really nothing. I’m not married. I have no
children.”
“All I really care about is the theater,” she continued. “But now, for the
first time, I know in my stomach that my work is
good.”