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Oscar night is all about the stars and the fashion. But last Sunday night during the Oscars one of the people turning heads wasn’t wearing Gucci or Dior. It wasn’t the rapper Nicki Minaj either. It was Sr. Dolores Hart.
It is a story straight out of Hollywood. A beautiful young star walks away from a blossoming movie career to become a nun, and 50 years later she returns to the Academy Awards ceremony — as the subject of an Oscar-nominated film on religious life.
She was the recipient of Elvis's first on screen kiss.
According to the New York Times the real-life drama of Dolores Hart, known as Mother Prioress to the nuns at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, unfolds in the HBO film “God Is the Bigger Elvis,” one of five nominees for best documentary (short subject). The 35-minute film examines Mother Dolores’s transformation from a Hollywood ingénue and the recipient of Elvis Presley’s first on-screen kiss to a cloistered Benedictine nun at the abbey, where for the past nine years she has been the prioress.
For more than a decade, Mother Dolores, 73, has had peripheral neuropathy, a painful neurological disorder that makes walking difficult at times. But on Sunday night, wearing her black habit, she will stepped out of a chauffeured limousine and made her first red-carpet appearance at the Oscars since she last attended in 1962. “It’s very exciting — absolutely,” she said. “Since I was a little girl, the movies and Hollywood have been a major part of my life.”
During her brief career, Dolores Hart appeared in 10 movies, and in 1959, the year she turned 21, she earned a Theatre World Award and a Tony nomination for her role as a featured actress in “The Pleasure of His Company.” But her future shifted that same year, when she first visited the abbey to unwind from her hectic performance schedule. She was already a devout Catholic, and the abbey visit, she says in the film, gave her “a sense of peace and interior renewal.”
Sr. Dolores on the red carpet with Sacha Baron Cohen
Four years later she decided to leave Hollywood forever. She packed a single suitcase and left New York for Bethlehem. The abbey — a converted brass factory set on 400 bucolic acres, which includes a chapel, a dormitory and a working farm — has been her home ever since.
It was not until she visited Washington in 2010 and met with Archbishop Pietro Sambi, then the apostolic nuncio to the United States, that the idea of making a film about monastic life was introduced. He wanted to make a film about consecrated life, she said, because he thought that people needed to understand it better.
“I said to him, ‘Archbishop, it’s been 50 years since I was in Hollywood,’ ” she said. “ ‘All my contacts are dead or gone.’ ”
“Have no worries, Dolores,” she recalled him saying. “The Lord will find a way.”
Two days after she returned to the abbey, HBO called. Call it sheer coincidence or heavenly intervention, but Sheila Nevins, executive producer of the film and president of HBO Documentary Films, who has a weekend home near Bethlehem, had suggested to Ms. Cammisa that the abbey and its Mother Prioress might make an interesting subject for a documentary.
Ms. Cammisa, whose mother had been a nun for 10 years, had filmed a documentary titled “Sister Helen,” about a Benedictine nun who ran a halfway house in the South Bronx, that was shown in 2002. In creating the new documentary, she sought to explore not only why Dolores Hart left Hollywood, but also what she had done all the years since. “We wanted to know her daily life, and also what it is about abbey life that drew these other women to it,” Ms. Cammisa said.
"The abbey was like a grace of God that just entered my life in a way that was totally unexpected."
Like the 35 other nuns in this self-supporting community, Mother Dolores follows a strict routine: praying seven times a day, chanting in Latin and eating meals in silence. Since taking her vows, she has served in many roles, including a baker, an education director, even a coffin maker. But as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, she has continued to cast her votes for Oscar winners year after year, watching DVDs of nominated films in her cinderblock basement office, where she keeps 20 finches; her African gray parrot, Toby; and a Great Dane, Inke.
“These women didn’t leave their identities behind when they walked through the door,” Ms. Cammisa said. “Mother Dolores was an actress, and that didn’t end when she joined the abbey.”
Still, why give up Hollywood for cloistered life?
“How do you explain God? How do you explain love?” she asks in the film.
Her answer is both simple and enigmatic: “I never felt I was leaving Hollywood,” she says. “I never felt I was leaving anything that I was given. The abbey was like a grace of God that just entered my life in a way that was totally unexpected — and God was the vehicle. He was the bigger Elvis.”
God is the Bigger Elvis will be released by HBO in April.
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