Cyril Ritchard: 

‘Captain Hook’

Millions knew him, not by his name but by his character. For Cyril Ritchard played Captain Hook alongside Mary Martin when the acclaimed Broadway production of “Peter Pan” was staged live for television March 7, 1955, making TV history with its huge audience and high quality production. 

His face and his voice were famous and he enjoyed telling of the time he was spotted by a rough-looking gang of teenagers who surrounded him. 

“I thought they were going to attack me, but instead they stared and exclaimed: ‘You're Captain Hook!’ I'm glad the reason for their attention was curiosity, not animosity.”

The witty actor from Australia starred in countless stage and screen productions around the world and over a career that started before World War I and ended in 1977 when he collapsed on stage of a heart attack. 

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard (a name he shortened to fit on marquees) in 1898,  Ritchard was

the son of a hotel manager father who wanted him to become a doctor. However, he quit medical school at the age of 19 and took to the stage, making his debut in the chorus of a Sydney musical. Three months later, he was performing the lead.

From there he went on to appear over the next half century in innumerable comedies, Shakespearean plays, musicals, and even operas.

“I have four notes, two of them good,” he said of his singing abilities. 

Ritchard also made six movies, including “Half A Sixpence” in 1967.

Shakespearean comedy fascinated Ritchard, who often performed at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn., and worked to raise money for its survival. In an effort typical of both his

energy and his versatility, he directed the play and performed two parts (Oberon and Bottom) in a 1967 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Stratford.

“It’s really a mental feat,” he said at the time. “The changes would be quite impossible if my mind panicked...But I like the challenge.”

Throughout his career he was known for his smile and his sense of humor. He once told Leonard Lyons of The New York Post That he was unaffected by small audiences in theaters. “Fortunately,” he said, “my sight is bad, so I can’t even see the empty seats.”

“He was a very funny and witty fellow,” said actress Kathleen Eason, a longtime friend and fellow Ridgefielder. “His stories and anecdotes of happenings to him on and off stage were

hysterically funny. Once, when he was very young and just starting to be successful, a fan asked for his autograph at a movie premiere. Cyril brightened right up and with his pencil poised, began laboriously to write: ‘Best wishes and good luck, Cyril Ritchard’ The irate fan said: ‘Come on, hurry up, don’t write a book. Here comes Greta Garbo!’ ”

He maintained that he developed his abilities at comedy as a child. “As I was taken to my room to be spanked by my father, I had to think of something to make him laugh,” he said. “If I could, it was a pretty weak spanking.”

He bought his Danbury Road home, which he called “Lone Rock,” in 1960, and “absolutely loved Ridgefield and that little house,” Eason said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of New York and to his Shangri-La, as he called it.”

Ritchard frequently entertained guests from New York at Lone Rock. One Sunday in the summer of 1965, he bused up the entire cast and crew from “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” in which he played one of his best-known roles. He had planned to serve them

beefsteak and kidney pies, but changed his mind. “I remembered about Americans and kidneys, and substituted the beef Wellington,” he said, adding that Americans are likely to find kidneys appealing only when they denote the shape of swimming pools.

He was often seen about town with his poodle, Trim (a trimmed version of his trimmed name). “He got to know a great many people in the town,” Mrs. Eason said. “He always raised his hat, helped old ladies across the road, and stopped to talk to people.”

Ritchard contributed to many local organizations including the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. He read the Declaration of Independence at a 1976 Bicentennial ceremony at the Community Center. “I was shocked when they asked me to do this,” he told the crowd. “I'm not an American. I'm a citizen of Australia. And I love the British. So there!”

Despite his age — he had turned 79 a couple weeks before his death — and warnings from his doctor, Ritchard maintained a work schedule that would tire a much younger man. In 1974, when he was hospitalized after collapsing at work in California, he admitted that “the doctor here says in the future I should be a little less enthusiastic in my work. I had been under pressure for six weeks. I was directing (“Sugar”), but nine other people thought they were, and kept screaming.”

   A few months later the 76-year-old appeared in three concerts of  “La Perichole” in Miami and a short time after that, gave 22 performances of 11 different programs during a 2½ week Theatre Guild at Sea cruise in the Caribbean.

   “I never worked so hard in my life,” he admitted afterward.

   A devout Catholic who attended  Mass almost daily, he was a benefactor of St. Mary's Parish. His funeral in 1977 was at St. Mary’s, with the Mass celebrated by longtime friend and TV celebrity, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. 

   Cyril Ritchard is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery next to his beloved wife, actress Madge Elliott, who had died five years before he moved to Ridgefield — he loved the town so much he had had her remains moved here from New York.

Under his name, Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard, on the gravestone, it says, “Captain Hook.”

Myles Eason:

Actor with 10 Green Thumbs

Myles Eason was seen by millions on stage, screen and television, but he was also seen by many at and around the Ballard Park Greenhouse where he not only lectured, but also worked.

“Being Australian and English, he has 10 green thumbs,” Edith Meffley of the Ridgefield Garden Club once said.

Oh, yes, Eason was also the first male member of that venerable garden club.

Myles Eason was born in Australian in 1915 and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. During World War II, he served in the British army, rising to the rank of  major in the Royal Artillery. His posts included being an aide to the commander of the British Seventh Armored Division, the so-called “Desert Rats,” and serving on the staff of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

After the war, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-on-Avon and was twice named Actor of the Year by the London Sunday Times.

He later appeared in London’s West End with Margaret Rutherford in a Noel Coward musical and was in several Globe Theatre revues.

In this country, his film credits included “Spider’s Web,” the Agatha Christie mystery with Margaret Lockwood, “Saraband” with Stewart Granger, and “Portrait of A Sinner.” His Broadway debut was in 1958 in “The Visit,” with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, and 

he appeared on stage in plays with such stars as Claudette Colbert, Joseph Cotton, and Agnes Moorehead.

He portrayed Henry Higgins in the New York City Center Light Opera Company production of “My Fair Lady,” and then in London with the National Company. 

More locally, in 1967, he was Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford in a staging produced by fellow Ridgefielder Cyril Ritchard.

On television, he appeared regularly in two soap operas, As the World Turns and The Guiding Light.

An avid gardener, Eason had elaborate gardens at his homes. “He had an uncanny knack for

growing things,” said Terry Keller, director of the Ballard Greenhouse in the 1970s, where Eason often volunteered. “His pride and joy were leeks and endives, and the flowers in his garden were sensational.”

She added that “he was so much fun — he told outrageous jokes.”

Eason was married to Kay Young, a British actress he first met in London in the 1940s when she was at the Chelsea Arts Ball dressed as Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.

“Who is that girl” Eason asked his hosts, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh as he was seated in their box watching a performance. “I’m going to marry her some day.”

Many years later and soon after her second husband, actor Douglass Montgomery had died of cancer, Young was invited to dinner at Australian-born actor Cyril Ritchard’s home on Danbury Road. Among the guests was Eason. Six months later, Kay and Myles were married. They lived first on Golf Lane and then on Olmstead Lane (in a house later owned by actor-singer David Cassidy of The Partridge Family fame). She, too, belonged to the garden club.

Eason died of a heart attack in 1977 while vacationing in the Cayman Islands. He was 61 years old.

Michael Connolly: 

A Songful But Short Life

Michael Connolly had finally “attained every actor-singer’s dream — his name in lights,” said his father shortly after Connolly died of a stroke in Los Angeles. 

It was 1989 and the longtime Ridgefielder, only 41, had just completed a successful, 14-month, national tour in Cole Porter’s musical, “Can-Can,” with Chita Rivera and Ron Holgate. 

James Michael Connolly was born in Massachusetts in 1947, came to Ridgefield as a boy and began acting and singing as a pupil at Veterans Park School. 

In 1965 he won the first $500 scholarship offered by the newly formed Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts (now the Ridgefield Theater Barn). One of the judges in the scholarship competition was actor Cyril Ritchard, the Ridgefielder famed for his Captain Hook portrayal in “Peter Pan.” Ritchard was so impressed with Connolly’s talent that he personally sent him another $500. He said the 16-year-old singer had a lot of talent and should be encouraged. 

During his high school and college years, Connolly performed in many local productions. He graduated from Fordham University with a degree in English and while a student there, founded and directed the first choral club at Fordham Preparatory School. 

Although he was certified to teach (and did do substitute teaching in the Ridgefield schools), his career was on the stage and he went on to perform in more than 15 Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with the Light Opera of Manhattan, in summer stock, and in many touring productions. 

He appeared in several Broadway shows; his first was “Otherwise Engaged,” with Dick Cavett, in which he was assigned a dressing room at the Plymouth Theater that was once occupied by John Barrymore. 

“It was humbling to me,” he said, “more like a shrine than a dressing room.” 

His other Broadway shows included “Annie” and “Amadeus,” and he toured the country in the national company of “On the Twentieth Century” with Rock Hudson and former Ridgefielder Imogene Coca. 

Another summer he toured in “Sherlock Holmes,” sharing the lead with Leonard Nimoy.

He also appeared in the television soap operas, “All My Children,” and “One Life to Live.”

Throughout his career, he continued to perform locally, and was especially remembered for singing the National Anthem at post-parade ceremonies on many Memorial Days in Ridgefield. 

However, he told his family, he saved his best performances “for the ladies of the kitchen” at Italian-American Club functions he often attended. 

“Whenever he dedicated two or three songs to them,” his father James Connolly said, “the staff would emerge, wiping their hands on their white aprons, to be serenaded by ‘Mattinata,’ ‘Torna a Sorrento,’ or ‘Santa Lucia.’ ”

Cyril Ritchard: 

‘Captain Hook’

Millions knew him, not by his name but by his character. For Cyril Ritchard played Captain Hook alongside Mary Martin when the acclaimed Broadway production of “Peter Pan” was staged live for television March 7, 1955, making TV history with its huge audience and high quality production. 

His face and his voice were famous and he enjoyed telling of the time he was spotted by a rough-looking gang of teenagers who surrounded him. 

“I thought they were going to attack me, but instead they stared and exclaimed: ‘You're

Captain Hook!’ I'm glad the reason for their attention was curiosity, not animosity.”

The witty actor from Australia starred in countless stage and screen productions around the world and over a career that started before World War I and ended in 1977 when he collapsed on stage of a heart attack. 

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard (a name he shortened to fit on marquees) in 1898,  Ritchard was the son of a hotel manager father who wanted him to become a doctor. However, he quit medical school at the age of 19 and took to the stage, making his debut in the chorus of a Sydney musical. Three months later, he was performing the lead.

From there he went on to appear over the next half century in innumerable comedies,

Shakespearean plays, musicals, and even operas.

“I have four notes, two of them good,” he said of his singing abilities. 

Ritchard also made six movies, including “Half A Sixpence” in 1967.

Shakespearean comedy fascinated Ritchard, who often performed at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn., and worked to raise money for its survival. In an effort typical of both his energy and his versatility, he directed the play and performed two parts (Oberon and Bottom) in a 1967 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Stratford.

“It’s really a mental feat,” he said at the time. “The changes would be quite impossible if my mind panicked...But I like the challenge.”

Throughout his career he was known for his smile and his sense of humor. He once told Leonard Lyons of The New York Post That he was unaffected by small audiences in theaters. “Fortunately,” he said, “my sight is bad, so I can’t even see the empty seats.”

“He was a very funny and witty fellow,” said actress Kathleen Eason, a longtime friend and fellow Ridgefielder. “His stories and anecdotes of happenings to him on and off stage were hysterically funny. Once, when he was very young and just starting to be successful, a fan asked for his autograph at a movie premiere. Cyril brightened right up and with his pencil poised, began laboriously to write: ‘Best wishes and good luck, Cyril Ritchard’ The irate fan said: ‘Come on, hurry up, don’t write a book. Here comes Greta Garbo!’ ”

He maintained that he developed his abilities at comedy as a child. “As I was taken to my room to be spanked by my father, I had to think of something to make him laugh,” he said. “If I could, it was a pretty weak spanking.”

He bought his Danbury Road home, which he called “Lone Rock,” in 1960, and “absolutely loved Ridgefield and that little house,” Eason said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of New York and to his Shangri-La, as he called it.”

Ritchard frequently entertained guests from New York at Lone Rock. One Sunday in the summer of 1965, he bused up the entire cast and crew from “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” in which he played one of his best-known roles. He had planned to serve them beefsteak and kidney pies, but changed his mind. “I remembered about Americans and kidneys, and substituted the beef Wellington,” he said, adding that Americans are likely to find kidneys appealing

only when they denote the shape of swimming pools.

He was often seen about town with his poodle, Trim (a trimmed version of his trimmed name). “He got to know a great many people in the town,” Mrs. Eason said. “He always raised his hat, helped old ladies across the road, and stopped to talk to people.”

Ritchard contributed to many local organizations including the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. He read the Declaration of Independence at a 1976 Bicentennial ceremony at the Community Center. “I was shocked when they asked me to do this,” he told the crowd. “I'm not an American. I'm a citizen of Australia. And I love the British. So there!”

Despite his age — he had turned 79 a couple weeks before his death — and warnings from his doctor, Ritchard maintained a work schedule that would tire a much younger man. In 1974, when he was hospitalized after collapsing at work in California, he admitted that “the doctor here says in the future I should be a little less enthusiastic in my work. I had been under pressure for six weeks. I was directing (“Sugar”), but nine other people thought they were, and kept screaming.”

A few months later the 76-year-old appeared in three concerts of “La Perichole” in Miami and a short time after that, gave 22 performances of 11 different programs during a 2½ week Theatre Guild at Sea cruise in the Caribbean.

“I never worked so hard in my life,” he admitted afterward.

A devout Catholic who attended  Mass almost daily, he was a benefactor of St. Mary's Parish.

His funeral in 1977 was at St. Mary’s, with the Mass celebrated by longtime friend and TV celebrity, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Cyril Ritchard is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery next to his beloved wife, actress Madge Elliott, who had died five years before he moved to Ridgefield — he loved the town so much he had had her remains moved here from New York.

Under his name, Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard, on the gravestone, it says, “Captain Hook.”