big white sign spelling out HOLLYWOODLAND, he vowed that here he would find his fame and fortune.
He lived on his wits, his voice, his strong back. With the wit he talked his way into building sets on back lots, sang his way through the work. He acted out the scenes he watched, practiced the various accents he’d heard on the trip from east to west.
Talkies changed everything, so now soundstages needed building. Actors he’d admired in their silence on-screen had voices that screeched or rumbled, so their stars burned out and fell.
His break came when a director heard him singing while he worked—the very tune the once-silent star was supposed to romance his lady with in a musical scene.
Liam knew the man couldn’t sing worth shite, and had his ear to the ground close enough to have heard there was talk about using another voice. It was, to his mind, simply being sure he was in the right place at the right time to be that voice.
His face might not have appeared on the screen, but his voice held the audience. It opened the door.
An extra, a walk-on, a bit part where he spoke his first line.
Building blocks, stepping-stones, forming a foundation fueled by the work, the talent, and the Sullivan tireless energy.
He, the farm boy from Clare, had an agent, a contract, and began in that Golden Age of Hollywood what would be a career that spanned decades and generations.
He met his Rosemary when he and the pert and popular Rosemary Ryan starred in a musical—the first of five films they’d make together in their lifetimes. The studio fed the gossip columns stories of their romance, but none of the hype was necessary.
They married less than a year after they clapped eyes on each other. They honeymooned in Ireland—visiting his family, as well as hers in Mayo.
They built a grand glamour of a home in Beverly Hills, had a son, then a daughter.
They bought the land in Big Sur because, as with their romance, it was love at first sight. The house they built facing the sea they named Sullivan’s Rest. It became their getaway, then as years passed more their home.
Their son proved the Sullivan-Ryan talent spanned generations, as Hugh’s star rose from child actor to leading man. As their daughter, Maureen, chose New York and Broadway.
Hugh would give them their first grandson before his wife, the love of his life, died in a plane crash returning from a location shoot in Montana.
That son would, in time, place another Sullivan star on the screen.
Liam and Rosemary’s grandson Aidan, believing, as with Sullivan tradition, he’d found the love of his life in the silky blond beauty of Charlotte Dupont, married in glittery style (exclusive photos in People magazine), bought a mansion in Holmby Hills for his bride. And gave Liam a great-granddaughter.
They named the fourth-generation Sullivan Caitlyn. Caitlyn Ryan Sullivan became an instant Hollywood darling when she made her film debut at twenty-one months playing the mischievous, matchmaking toddler in Will Daddy Make Three?
The fact that most reviews found little Cate upstaged both adult leads (which included her mother as the female love interest) caused some consternation in certain quarters.
It might have been her last taste of preadolescent stardom, but her great-grandfather cast her, at age six, as the free-spirited Mary Kate in Donovan’s Dream. She spent six weeks on location in Ireland, and shared the screen with her father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother.
She delivered her lines in a west county accent as if she’d been born there.
The film, a critical and commercial success, would be Liam Sullivan’s last. In one of the rare interviews he gave toward the end of his life, sitting under a flowering plum tree with the Pacific rolling toward forever, he said, like Donovan, he’d seen his dream come true. He’d made a fine film with the woman he’d loved for six decades, with their boys Hugh and Aidan, and the bright light of his great-granddaughter, Cate.
Movies, he said, had given him the grandest of adventures, so this, he felt, was a perfect cap for the genie bottle of his life.
On a cool, bright February afternoon, three weeks after his death, his widow, his family, and many of the friends he’d made through the years gathered at his Big Sur estate to—as Rosemary insisted—celebrate a life well and fully lived.
They’d held a formal funeral in L.A., with luminaries and eulogies, but this would be to remember the joy he’d given.