O'Neill, Eugene

The American playwright Eugene O'Neill, the son of actors James O'Neill and Ella Quinlan, was born in a Manhattan hotel. His parents' stormy marriage came to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his plays. As a child, O'Neill followed his parents on tour; his father often played the leading role in the popular melodrama The Count of Monte Christo. They travelled by train and mostly stayed in hotels. At the age of seven, O'Neill entered a Catholic boarding school in Connecticut, the St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, and around 1900 he was transferred to a school on Manhattan. He was lonely and spent a lot of his time reading books. During these formative years, his mother's morphine abuse scarred him for life, especially since he was told that she was using it because of him. She tried to drown herself in 1902 during a withdrawal period. O'Neill left the Catholic Church in his teens.