Louis Elliman

The Irish Impresario who went to Hollywood

The impresarios’ club is small, and it was even smaller in the early part of the last century. In Ireland, from the 1930s to the 1950s, its major figure was Louis Elliman.

Louis followed his father Maurice into the entertainment industry. Maurice had ventured into early cinema in 1910 when Louis was seven. One of almost three million East European Jews to flee the pogroms of Tsarist Russia, Maurice had reached Dublin in 1892, aged 20 and penniless. He found his niche in the entertainment world, and became, in the words of the Dublin Evening Mail, “the father of the Dublin film trade.”

When World War II closed the sea lanes and foreign stars stayed away, he nurtured native Irish talent, many of whom later became known worldwide. By the time the world was once more at peace and international stars returned to Ireland, Louis was, in the words of The Irish Independent, Ireland’s Mr. Show Business. Over 30 cinemas countrywide were under Elliman management, along with Dublin’s Metropole, Royal and Gaiety Theatres, and he was soon to open Ardmore Studios, bringing film production to Ireland.

In 1950, Louis made a three-month business trip by ship, plane and rail to both coasts of the USA and to Australia, where he was feted, wined and dined by the major studios — Paramount, Rank, Universal — and partied with the stars. A carbon copy of his 250-page journal of the trip survives, and is reproduced here.

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Traffic lights were switched off through central Dublin and a Garda (police) escort was detailed to control the vast crowds who accompanied Louis Elliman on his last journey — just as they had for his father before him. Together with Louis’s family and most of Dublin’s Jewish community, dignitaries and personalities from every walk of life escorted, in Maureen Potter’s words, “this great and lovable man, this friend in need” to the Jewish cemetery at Dolphin’s Barn on November 15, 1965.

Among them were Dublin’s Lord Mayor Eugene Timmons, Commandant Jack O’Brien representing Ireland’s Taoisach (President) Seán Lemass, and MP Bobby Briscoe representing the nation’s President Éamon de Valera. The hundreds from Ireland’s the entertainment world included actors Noel Purcell, Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLíammóir, Abbey Theatre director Gavriel Allon, the Dublin Grand Opera Society’s Colonel Bill O’Kelly, Catholic Stage Guild chaplain Father Cormac Daly, and Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union Cinema & Theatre Branch vice president Frank Robbins, together with representatives of Equity, the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Cork Film Festival, the Gaelic League, the Theatres and Cinemas of Ireland, the Variety Club and the Cinema and Theatre Benevolent Society of Ireland.

Louis Elliman, felled at age 62 by a coronary occlusion, “could reasonably be described as the greatest Irish theatrical impresario of the first half of the 20th century, and…a key figure in Irish cinema,” says the Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema. He was “a super showman,” declaimed The Irish Times, “a very influential person in the Irish entertainment field…[who] from behind the scenes, has made generations of Dubliners happy,” and his death was “a profound loss.” The Irish Independent named him “Ireland’s Mr. Show Business,” and others hailed him as “a significant historical presence in national life…a national figure and a dominant Irish icon.”

More than 50 years since his death, some believe that Louis still frequents the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin’s South King Street, which he bought in 1936 and managed until his death, almost 30 years later. “He’s usually seen in the boardroom or by the fireplace in the dress circle bar, where he liked to sit,” recalled 88-year-old George McFall, Gaiety stage manager for 48 years, to The Irish Times in 2017. “There had been so many great performances on the Gaiety stage that they had to have left something of themselves behind.”

Louis was born on February 28, 1903, at 42 Aungier Street, Dublin, third child of Maurice and Leah Elliman in a family that by 1923 was to number nine sons and three daughters.

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Patriarch Maurice, who started life in a village near Kovno in Lithuania, had reached Dublin 11 years earlier, aged 20, one of close to three million East European Jews who fled the Tsarist pogroms. He had walked from Kovno to Hamburg, then sailed to Liverpool and on to Kingstown (later, Dún Laoghaire). In 1910, after trying his hand at peddling door to door, running a boardinghouse and managing a grocery, he found his calling in the infant technology of film.

Louis, he decided, was to be a pharmacist like his mother’s brother. “When I was thirteen, I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” Louis told The Irish Independent in October 1964. So he was taken out of the Synge Street Christian Brothers School (presciently near the birthplace of playwright George Bernard Shaw) and “apprenticed to a chemist In South Richmond Street. I put in eight long weary years there. That was in the days before unions, and I slaved away from 9 a.m. to 10.30 p.m. for a few shillings a week.”

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Formalizing his qualifications at the National University of Ireland, he graduated in Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 1924, and “like so many other Irishmen before me,” went to London, where he found a position at the Piccadilly branch of Boots the Chemist.

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The pull of cinema, however, proved stronger than pharmaceuticals, and in London Louis moonlighted as his father’s representative, developing contacts with film offices and distributors. Maurice soon acknowledged that his son was the best salesman in the business. First National Pictures (later to merge with Warner Brothers) was the vehicle on which Louis rode back to Dublin and into the family business.First National had been set up in 1917 by an association of independent US theatre-owners largely to rival Paramount, and had since expanded from distributing films to producing them. In 1929, when it moved into Ireland, Louis returned to Dublin as its branch manager.

Two years later, he married Dublin-born Ettie Robinson, and the year after that, aged 29, opened an independent film distribution company, Louis Elliman Ltd. From offices in Abbey Street, it handled films from emerging British companies — Associated British Film Distributors and British Lion — and from America’s Republic Films Ltd., whose stable of stars included John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

It was the mid-1930s and Louis “had spent a miserable day in Belfast trying to do business. There were only a few first-run cinemas there and they wouldn’t buy my junk. I said to myself: ‘Someday, I’ll put up a decent release-cinema in this so-and-so town.’ On the way to the Dublin train, I saw this site vacant, and on impulse got the lease on it. I went to London to raise the money and within three months, I was ready to build the Ritz.”

It was this impulse that enabled the Ellimans to move into live entertainment and transform Louis from businessman to impresario. In 1936, a month before the Belfast Ritz was due to open, Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre came onto the market. Maurice, who, by then, owned five Dublin cinemas (among them the luxurious Theatre de Luxe on Camden Street) and “whose flair for cinema locations and films seemed unfailing,” according to The Irish Times, had always stayed clear of live talent. Louis, however, convinced his father that the family should acquire the Gaiety, bought himself in with funds raised by selling the unopened Ritz, and became its managing director. Two years later, the family acquired the Theatre Royal, the second largest theatre in all Europe, which, under Louis, soon became “the premier entertainment venue in the land.”

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With his talent in production and management, his quiet but effective manner and his great powers of imagination, Louis threw himself into live entertainment and made an indelible mark on Dublin theatre. A capable, creative and hardworking administrator, a man of taste and discernment with a flair for the spectacular, he was intimately in touch with his era of glossy Hollywood stars, spectaculars, musicals, galas, lavish productions and extravagant publicity. He held himself responsible for every show he produced, while fully crediting all those who worked with him. “He applied to the theatre the technique he used when buying films,” relates The Irish Times. “His capacity for envisioning a setting, for getting that something extra out of it, and for staying on his feet without sleep for hours was immense.”

At the Gaiety, Dublin’s longest-established theatre, which he managed from 1936 to 1965, Louis’s talents as a producer soared. Showboat, The King and I and The Golden Years (the story of Percy French and his music) were among many successes that he produced, starring Mai Devitt, Josef Locke and Dickie Forbes. He instituted the Gaiety’s home-produced Christmas pantomimes; under him “the Dublin Grand Opera Society established its two annual seasons, now continued by Opera Ireland;” and he donated the theatre, its equipment and staff to WIZO (the Women’s International Zionist Organization) for their annual fundraising concerts.

At the Theatre Royal, he staged two performances a day — a live show and the latest movie. Under his nom de plume T.R. Royle, Louis produced a weekly revue at the Royal, sometimes writing part of it himself. “They used to call me Captain Blood Pressure,” he smiles.

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