Eileen Mary Ure was born on
February 18, 1933 in Glasgow, Scotland to Colin McGregor Ure (a
civil engineer) and the former Edith Swinburne. She was
the granddaughter of the Lord Provost of Glasgow. Her
basic schooling was at the Mount School in York, England.
Her first performance on stage was as the Virgin Mary in a
revival of the Cycle of Mystery Plays, from the Middle Ages.
The new producers, impressed with her performance sent her to
study at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art
in London.
In 1954, she made her
professional stage debut in Manchester and then went on to
London to star in Jean Anouilh's "Time Remembered". In
1955, she played Ophelia with Paul Scofield in Hamlet and went
on to play Desdemona and Titania.
She met John Osborne in 1956 during a production
of "A View from the Bridge" in which she had a Brooklyn accent.
She married Osborne in 1957 and went to New York to star in the
production of Look Back in Anger in 1958 which won her a Tony
award nomination for Best Dramatic Actress. She had
received rave reviews for the Broadway production as one read,
"As the tormented wife, Mary Ure succeeds in retaining the pride
of an intelligent young woman by filling her silences with
unspoken vitality, by being alive and by glowing with youth in
every sequence." It later became a film starring Mary Ure
and Richard Burton.
She met Robert Shaw around 1959, had an
affair with him and they would later marry on April 13, 1963.
They would have four children together and a very happy
marriage, as Mary was quoted as saying, "a gloriously loving,
combative, thoroughly agreeable to us disagreeable
relationship." I found it both amusing and moving to read
a copy of The Flag recently as it was obvious who Robert Shaw
was thinking of when he wrote it, I believe on the set of Battle
of the Bulge if I'm not mistaken. It is even dedicated to
Mary.
Robert Shaw for all Seasons