Helen Gallagher, the spunky Broadway triple threat who received two Tony Awards and starred as the matriarch Maeve Ryan for all 13-plus years of the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope, has died. She was 98.
Gallagher died Sunday, colleagues at New York’s Herbert Berghof Studio announced. For years, she taught a class in “Singing for the Musical Theater” there.
The radiant singer, dancer and actress received her first Tony in 1952 for her portrayal of showgirl Gladys Bumps in a revival of the Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey, then landed another in 1971 for her turn as flapper Lucille Early, another wise-cracking character, in a revival of Busby Berkeley’s No, No, Nanette.
“When Miss Gallagher sings the blues of a lovelorn wife with piece of chiffon and a chorus of properly epicene tailor’s dummies, she makes the good old days come alive once more,” Clive Barnes wrote in his Nanette review for The New York Times, referring to her performance of “Where Has My Hubby Gone Blues.”
The Bronx-reared star received another Tony nomination in 1967 for playing the dancer Nickie in the original Broadway production of Sweet Charity, directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse; later, she took over for Gwen Verdon in the title role and sang the show-stopping “Big Spender.”
Gallagher worked with many of the great Broadway choreographers of the past 70 years, Fosse, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, Gower Champion, Anton Dolin, Donald Saddler and Robert Alton among them. Asked at a Lambs theatrical club event in February 2019 what they all had in common, she replied, “Temperament. People that are associated with dance and the teaching aspect of it are never known for their sweetness and kindness.”
In all, Gallagher appeared in nearly two dozen shows, from 1944 through 1981, on the Broadway stage.
On Ryan’s Hope, which aired from July 1975 to January 1989, her Maeve, a native of County Cork, Ireland, and mother of three, helped husband Johnny (Bernard Barrow) run a New York City tavern called Ryan’s across the street from a hospital.
During its run, she learned how to do an Irish jig and often sang “Danny Boy,” closing the show by singing the iconic ballad from a seat atop the bar. (Watch the emotional scene here.)
“Ryan’s Hope was the best,” Gallagher said in 1997. “First of all, it was a half-hour show — wonderfully cast and wonderfully written. There were plenty of times when it was boring, but as a rule, it was really interesting — the people were centered and had work to do. It wasn’t just a matter of sitting around on couches talking about your emotional problems. There was a life going on in that place, maybe because it was centered on a bar. It was just magic.”
She won Daytime Emmy Awards for outstanding actress in a drama series in 1976, 1977 and 1988, and in 2010 the website We Love Soaps placed her No. 10 on its list of the 50 Greatest Soap Actresses.
After Ryan’s Hope was canceled, she soldiered on in other daytime serials, playing Hannah Tuttle on NBC’s Another World in 1989, Nurse Harris on ABC’s All My Children in 1995 and Maude Boyland Hayes on ABC’s One Life to Live in 1997-98.
The daughter of a banker, Gallagher was born in Brooklyn on July 19, 1926, and then raised in Scarsdale, New York, and the East Bronx. By the time she graduated from St. Frances of Rome grammar school, she already had been studying dance for four years.
“I was so shy, but on stage I was totally free, there was a sort of absolution there, to do what you couldn’t in life,” she told the Times in 1971.
The 5-foot-2 Gallagher studied at the American School of Ballet, and in 1944 she made her Broadway debut in the Cole Porter musical revue Seven Lively Arts, performing in a number composed by Igor Stravinsky.
She danced and had a speaking role in the Comden-Green musical Billion Dollar Baby; danced in the original 1947-48 production of the Lerner & Loewe musical Brigadoon, choreographed by de Mille; and was featured alongside Nanette Fabray and Phil Silvers in High Button Shoes, choreographed by Robbins.
“I was not an Agnes de Mille dancer,” she once said. “I was the girl in the third line — there were two lines of girls and then me — because she couldn’t stand the way I danced. Agnes wanted ethereal, legato movement, which was so foreign to me. With Jerry Robbins, I was able to catch what he wanted, which was the hyper, jitterbugging energy of what was going on in the streets.”
Gallagher reunited with Fabray for the 1951 musical Make a Wish (book by Preston Sturges). After Pal Joey, she played the title role in the 1953 Jule Styne-Ben Hecht musical Hazel Flagg (Jerry Lewis adapted her part for his 1954 movie Living It Up) and replaced Carol Haney as Gladys Hotchkiss in the original 1954-56 production of The Pajama Game, directed by George Abbott and Robbins and choreographed by Fosse.
From 1955-57, she starred in revivals of Guys and Dolls — she played Adelaide opposite Walter Matthau as Nathan Detroit — Finian’s Rainbow, Brigadoon and Oklahoma! (as Ado Annie, one of her favorite roles), then starred in Mame as the frumpy Agnes Gooch.
She took her final Broadway bow in 1981 in Sugar Babies but starred as actress Tallulah Bankhead in a 1984 production in the Hamptons.
On the big screen, Gallagher appeared in Kirk Douglas‘ Strangers When We Meet (1960) and with Christopher Walken in James Ivory’s Roseland (1977).
In 1956, she married Frank Wise, a stagehand she had met when she was in The Pajama Game. At the Lambs event, she related that they once went to the theater to see Verdon perform, at which point he told her, “I’ve got to admit, she’s got something you don’t have,” she recalled.
After a beat, she added, “I divorced him.”
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