Going Her Way

Her black hair straggled to her shoulders, and her tight tweeds strained in odd bulges. For three weeks of rehearsal, she worked as unobtrusively as if she were the second lead's standin. But when the Du Pont Show of the Month put What Every Woman Knows on the air last week, she gave new life to the dated charm of the J. M. Barrie play. As Maggie Wylie, the homely but wise and witty Scottish lass who is the real reason behind her bartered bridegroom's success, Ireland's Siobhan (pronounced Shi-vawn) McKenna, 35, was a trim, burr-voiced delight.

Sentimentalists who had seen Maude Adams or Helen Hayes sweeten the role did not find the Maggie of their memories. "Maggie isn't so virtuous," says Siobhan in her rich resonance, the native Gaelic just a thin inflection away. "She can be a bloomin' bitch. I could play her all mealymouthed, the poor little rich girl, but I don't see it that way."

Cantankerous Christian. Siobhan McKenna has been playing parts her way ever since she grew up in Galway, daughter of a mathematics professor, and began her play acting with her pals in a neighbor's barn. For a while the theater came close to losing her to her father's profession, but her love of Gaelic and the stage kept her coming back to Irish drama. Soon she was involved with Saint Joan, the role that has almost become her alter ego. For a starter she translated the Shaw play into Gaelic, but her greatest triumph came later on the New York stage in 1956. There, her Joan emerged as a thick-brogued peasant, tough and practical and yet a single-minded fanatic.

Ever since Joan, Siobhan has starred as an international vagabond. "I go from country to country, and half the time I don't know where I am.'' But movies, stage or television, she always knows what she wants to be. "In England,'' she says, "first they wanted to change my name. I said: 'No, thank you; I don't know who was responsible for it, but obviously they went to a lot of trouble to think it up.' " In Hollywood, she had similar trouble. "They said: 'We'll get you great parts, but first we'll spend six months grooming you.' Then somebody told me what grooming means--it means an operation on your behind, your front and your nose, so I said that's that."

Idle Fear. Her travels have taken Siobhan from Broadway (The Chalk Garden, The Rope Dancers ) and off-Broadway (Saint Joan) shows to London movies

(Daughter of Darkness) and back to Manhattan for TV (Cradle Song and The Letter). Between assignments she lives with husband Denis O'Dea, a dental student turned actor, and their ten-year-old son in a four-story Georgian house in Dublin. The blunt matter-of-factness she displayed as Maggie Wylie last week belongs in large measure to Siobhan McKenna. Says she: "I'm a party girl, but if I have a hangover, I take nothing for it; I want to know how hung over I am." Her forthright opinions are famed among her friends. Some samples: P: On Catholicism: "I believe every word." P:On money: "I'll never sacrifice myself on the altar of poverty." P:On "Method" acting: "Ridiculous. It isn't important what you feel; it's what the audience feels that counts." P: On the Irish: "We're pragmatic. We say to the English and Americans, 'All right, if you're fools enough to believe all this nonsense about us, go to it.' Some day I want to make films in Ireland, where they have no vision of women. It's a man's country."

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