A child star returns

The red-haired, blue-eyed Malone was 10 years old, at which point she was already a pro, having started acting and modeling when she was seven.
At 16, the actress achieved a measure of national fame when she scored on Broadway playing the title role in playwright Ronald Alexander’s smash hit comedy, “Time Out for Ginger.”
The star was Melvyn Douglas, cast as an affluent banker one of whose three daughters, the youngest, the eponymous Ginger, was bound and determined to play football on a school team
Alexander’s affable attraction opened on Wednesday, Nov. 26, 1952, at the Lyceum Theater and ran for nearly a year, and then went on a national tour which began at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Conn., on Oct. 1, 1953.
“Melvyn Douglas taught me everything I know about comedy,” she recalled. “There was nobody better. He was brilliant.”
The presence of the name of Douglas, an established star of stage and screen, standing by itself above the play’s title, had very probably had a major role in making the production a reality, but once the show had opened and a cordial cluster of newspaper reviews had come in, there was fervid interest in the Irish-American teenager from Queens who had scored the theatrical equivalent of a touchdown.
There would be plenty of more work on Broadway, but eventually she settled in California and a career in television.
Now, Malone is back in New York, this time as the director of Mark O’Rowe’s intense two-character play, “Howie the Rookie,” which opens officially tonight at the Irish Arts Center on West 51st Street.
The former actress, whose eyes are still as clear and as blue as cornflower blossoms, and whose tousled hair is still an appealing reddish blonde, made the transition to directing with what appears to be spectacular ease, eventually racking up a record of television credits which includes, among many others, segments of such series as “Cagney & Lacey,” “Sisters,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Touched by an Angel,” “Dawson’s Creek” and “Judging Amy.”
She first became interested in “Howie the Rookie” when Georganne Aldrich Heller, who is co-producing the play at the Irish Arts Center, brought it to her, suggesting it might be a suitable vehicle for a return to the perilous world of New York theatre.
Taking a break from rehearsals a few days before previews began, Malone remembered her initial reactions to the possibility of directing “Howie the Rookie.”
She liked what she read. “I found it very challenging, and I hoped I could eventually be able to understand it thoroughly enough to be able to direct it correctly,” she said. “I asked Georganne if anybody was already attached to the project, and she told me about a young Irish actor, John O’Callaghan, who was set to do it.”
Soon, a second Irish-born performer, Mark Byrne, was cast alongside O’Callaghan and the director and her team began rehearsing the play in a space Malone rented at the Stella Adler Studio.
“It just got better and better,” she recalled. “As we got nearer and nearer to coming to New York, I knew we were going to have a different kind of experience.”
Malone doesn’t see herself as an actress anymore. “I’ve crossed the line into directing,” she said. Not that she couldn’t do both if she wanted to. She voices a complaint that echoes the attitude of most mature actresses.
“Nobody writes parts for women over 50 that mean anything,” she said. “It’s as though every woman over 50 has disappeared from the planet. I think it’s very unfortunate for young people, watching television and the movies, not to have that age range in front of them sociologically. I think it’s terrible. It’s truly bizarre. I have so many friends who are so brilliant, and they’re not getting any jobs.”
For Malone, “crossing the line” into directing, was painless and somewhat accidental. “In those days, they’d fly you out to do one of the popular shows of the moment, ‘Twilight Zone’ or ‘Doctor Kildare’ or whatever, and then you’d come home to New York until the next time,” she said.
“At one point, they wanted to see me at Fox about a series called ‘The Long Hot Summer,’ based on the movie. It was directed by Robert Altman, before he became famous,” she remembered.
Then, Tom Moore, president of ABC, for whom she had done two series, told Malone that he was putting together a company called Tomorrow Entertainment.
“He suggested that since I was always complaining about the lack of parts for women, that I could do something about it,” she said.
What he had in mind was that Malone should begin working behind the camera instead of in front of it. Moore told her that if she came to work for him, he’d teach her the business.
“I’m not going to pay you very much money,” he told her, “But you can try producing and directing your own stuff.”
He also had something else in mind. “He told me I ought to think abut stopping acting,” she remembered.
Malone described the job as “sitting in a room, reading scripts, making acquaintances with agents, and kind of beginning to understand how the whole thing went. I loved it, and I found out I had an instinct for it, and I found some great scripts.”
Eventually, Malone left Tomorrow Entertainment and worked for NBC for a while, and then got an offer to head up television development at Fox.
She was quickly promoted. “I was the first woman vice president at Fox. I was called vice president of development for comedy,” she said.
Still, she always thought she’d be returning to New York, which was, after all, her real home, and that’s where her family still was at the time.
Malone’s mother, the former Bridget Winifred Shields, had been born in County Armagh into a Catholic family of 10 children.
“I loved my mother more than anything in the world,” Malone said, her clear blue eyes misting up a bit. “I loved my father, too, but my mother and I were practically the same person.”
With her parents deceased and one brother living in Ohio and the other in California, the family has vanished from Queens Village, but, thanks to the Irish Arts Center, Mark O’Rowe and his play, “Howie the Rookie,” Nancy Malone has finally made her return to New York.