Mother Dolores Hart, the woman who left her movie career to become a
Benedictine nun, has released a new biography explaining her shift from a
rising star in Hollywood to life as a cloistered religious.
“I have used the analogy of falling from a 20 story building because
that’s what I felt like the first night after I entered,” Mother Hart
told CNA May 6.
When she was approached by her life-long friend Richard DeNeut some 10
years ago about the possibility of writing a memoir, she feared that she
would have neither the time nor the memory to write all “the wonderful
things that happened” into a book.
However, DeNeut insisted saying that her memoir would be “very good” and “very important” for others to read.
The friends began speaking for about an hour each day over the phone and
Skype to get her story on paper and eventually they had enough material
for a book.
However, they ran into difficulty when many publishers wanted to start
the book with her role in “Loving You,” the 1957 film where she gave
Elvis Presley his first on-screen kiss – which would have left out
details of her turbulent upbringing and childhood conversion to
Catholicism.
Eventually the pair turned to Ignatius Press, the California-based
Catholic publisher because they “promised they would stay honest” to her
story, Mother Hart said.
“We didn’t do it because they were a Catholic publisher,” she said, “mainly because they made that promise.”
When she entered the monastery in 1963, the 24 year-old actress shocked
her friends, family and the rest of Hollywood. The then-actress was
engaged to be married, had a multi-film contract with Metro Goldwyn
Mayer and was pulling in $5,000 a week.
However, her heart kept going back to the Abbey of Regina Laudis, a
Benedictine monastery in Connecticut founded by French nuns in 1947
where she visited for retreat during her time on Broadway in her
Tony-nominated performance in The Pleasure of His Company.
“In my mind’s eye my desire to enter the monastery was to find God,” she
explained. “Well, God wasn’t waiting for me on the other side of the
door – in certain ways, he was, but not in the way I had imagined.”
One evening after an engagement party, her fiancé, Don Robinson, sensed
that her heart was with “something or someone else” and told her she
needed to settle that before they were married.
“It was something that had been gnawing on me, the thought that maybe this was something I should do,” she said.
Hart packed her bags and left Hollywood for Connecticut where she met
with the Mother Abbess to seriously discern the possibility of her
vocation to the religious life.
“It was very clear before I left that what I had to do was enter the monastery because that’s where my heart was,” she said.
During that time, another Catholic actress, June Haver, had made
headlines when she become a postulant with the Sisters of Charity in
Kansas, only to leave after just a few months.
In order to avoid the publicity, Hart was instructed to keep her decision quiet until she actually entered.
“It was a horrible time,” she said. “I couldn’t accept any contracts, I
couldn’t accept to do anything, I couldn’t tell anyone anything.”
Although she had made the decision to enter she continued to wonder, “Is this really going to be the answer?”
“I left the world I knew in order to reenter it on a more profound level,” she writes in the book’s preface.
“Many people don't understand the difference between a vocation and your
own idea about something. A vocation is a call – one you don't
necessarily want. The only thing I ever wanted to be was an actress. But
I was called by God.”
Some 50 years later, Mother Hart is now the prioress of the Abbey and
looking back, she realizes how she’s been able to use the gifts that God
gave her which made her a successful actress, namely listening.
“I never would have thought that except when I really got into (acting)
and found out that a good actor or a good actress really has to listen
first of all to the character that you have to portray,” she said.
“When I did finally come to Regina Laudis, I was touched by the fact
that the first words of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict read, ‘Listen my
daughter, my son, to the voice of your Master with the ear of your
heart.’”
Mother Hart explained that “religious life” as some may assume, “is not
leaving your gifts at the door and coming inside to find God in some
mystique.”
Rather, she said, “A community brings its gifts with you and serves one another with what you have.”