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William Joseph O'Brien, Jr. was born around the turn of the century into a deeply religious and devotedly Catholic Irish-American family. He had two younger brothers but they both died at very young ages. His father, William O'Brien, Sr., was the son of Irish immigrants from County Cork. When Bill O'Brien was a young man he left New York and headed west first to Chicago and then to Milwaukee. There in Milwaukee he met Margaret McGovern, the daughter of Irish immigrants from Galway. They soon married.
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| Young Billy O'Brien, Jr. (he later assumed the name Pat in honor of his of his Irish grandfather) had a pleasant childhood. He spent a lot of his free time playing in the park, hopping freight trains, and roasting potatoes on the corner lot. Sports also consumed much of his time and energy during his youth. He pitched in baseball games for a local team which he and his friends had organized. Besides baseball he was also very much devoted to football. During his school years he broke his collar bone and both his ankles while playing football. The church was also important. He was a dedicated altar boy, and he won a scholarship to attend the Catholic Marquette Academy for high school. There he met another boy destined to become an actor-- Spencer Tracy. They were to remain life long friends. When World War I came O'Brien, Tracy, and a few of their friends went and joined the Navy. None of them got to see combat though. O'Brien spent the war playing half-back on the Great Lakes Naval Academy's football team, doing practice drills, and mopping up offices. After the war he went back and graduated from high school and then entered Marquette University and Law School. | |
| He soon decided he did not realy want to be a lawyer; his true passion was acting. His first break into the theatre occurred when some relatives invited him to stay with them in New York. Once there he hung around all the casting agencies until he was cast as a dancer in the Broadway production of the musical comedy Adrienne. He soon went back to Milwaukee and college when he learned that his father was seriously ill. But his father soon recovered and off he went back to New York, but this time he enrolled in an acting school payed for by his veteran's stipend. Spencer Tracy, who was also attending the same school, rented a one room apartment with him. After a while they both got parts in Karel Capek's science-fiction |
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play R. U. R., but they still ran low on money and had to share clothes and skip meals. O'Brien left the school in 1923 and joined a traveling stock company. Soon, however, he returned to Milwaukee again, this time because his girlfriend convinced him to go back. He tryed selling insurance for a while but actor's blood ran through his vains, and he went back to New York and Broadway.
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| After several parts on the New York stage, O'Brien got a role in the play Broadway, which toured throughout the South. He ended up with the play in the Chicago of the Roaring Twenties-- gangsters and all. Also in the company was a young actress from Des Moines, Iowa named Eloise Taylor. They fell in love and were eventually married in 1931. They remained together until his death in 1983. | ||||
| O'Brien was in several decent plays on Broadway and elsewhere including Tenth Avenue with his close friends Spencer Tracy and Frank McHugh, but the part that really changed his life was that of Hildy Johnson in The Front Page. Lewis Milestone had been impressed with O'Brien, and he suggested to Howard Hughes that O'Brien was the right man to play Hildy Johnson in Hughes' upcoming film production of the Hecht and MacArthur hit play. O'Brien was given a contract and shipped out to Hollywood. The Front Page, which also starred Adolphe Menjou and Mary Brian, received good reviews and launched O'Brien's film career. |
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After The Front Page, he starred in a whole series of films for Warner Brothers, several of which co-starred some of his close friends, such as James Cagney, Frank McHugh, and Allen Jenkins. At Warner Brothers in the early thirties he starred in Consolation Marriage (1931) with Irene Dunne, American Madness (1932) with Walter Huston, Air Mail (1932) with Ralph Bellamy, and Bombshell (1933), one of the more famous of his early films, with Jean Harlow. Some other popular thirties films that he was in were Flirtation Walk (1934) with Dick Powell, Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) in one of his most remembered roles, that of Father Jerry Connolly.
| The part that O'Brien is best remembered for, that of Knute Rockne in Knute Rockne, All American, came in 1940. James Cagney had been intended to play the famous Notre Dame football coach, but Rockne's widow and the President of Notre Dame held out for O'Brien in the role. Subsequently, O'Brien put in what is considered by many to be the best performance of his career and one that also raised his popularity considerably. Another one of his best remembered and well liked
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roles was that of the real life chaplin of the New York 69th Regiment during World War I, Father Francis Duffy, in the film The Fighting 69th.
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When World War II came along, O'Brien did what he could to help the cause of liberty. He traveled with a large group of actors including his friends Cagney, McHugh, and Bert Lahr on a war bond selling tour across the nation. After this he joined a USO unit and was sent over the Himalayas to entertain troops in far off Burma.
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After the war, O'Brien's movie career began to decline; by the early fifties it had practically stopped. He took to traveling the nightclub circuit and he returned to the theatre (even to the part of Hildy Johnson in The Front Page). His film career did pick up a bit when Spencer Tracy demanded a part for his old pal O'Brien in his next film The People Against O'Hara (1951). O'Brien also got parts in two famous classic films of the fifties: The Last Hurrah (1958) and Some Like it Hot (1959). In the early sixties he starred in a short running television show
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Harrigan and Son, and he penned his autobiography The Wind at My Back. In 1973 he was voted "Man of the Year" by the Catholic Actor's Guild. His last film role was that of Delmas in the 1981 movie Ragtime which starred his long-time friend James Cagney. He died in 1983 at the age of eighty-three.
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