THE NUN WHO KISSED ELVIS
"Meet the Hollywood Actress Who Cut Off Her Bombshell Hair to Become a Roman Catholic Nun
They said she was going to be the next Grace Kelly, with her long blonde curls and big blue eyes and ability to work the lens opposite stars like Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley. In fact, in the 1957 film Loving You, the rising actress gave the King his very first on-screen kiss—she blushed and then he blushed and “the director kept yelling ‘cut!’ ”
And even though she didn’t date the heartthrob, when she suddenly disappeared from the limelight a few years later, rumors were that she’d fled Hollywood after bearing the icon’s love child.
“Nothing could have been further from the truth,” says Mother Dolores Hart, 80, more than five decades later from her office in the Abbey of Regina Laudis, an enclosed Benedictine monastery and working farm in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Her story was the subject of an Oscar-nominated short film, God is the Bigger Elvis, released in 2012.
These days, the actress turned Roman Catholic nun can be found in the monastery, tending to the community as well as her chickens and cows and
llamas, not to mention her African gray parrot, Beau, who is currently whistling into the phone. Mother Dolores also meets her sisters seven times a day and once at night for prayer.
“Stability is one of the significant factors of the rules of Saint Benedict,” she says, admitting it was also what attracted her to becoming a nun in the first place, given her difficult childhood, in which she was shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and Illinois. “My parents divorced and
married three times over,” she says, matter-of-factly.
But it wasn’t all a seamless transition for the prioress who, then 24 years old in 1963, had to quietly purge all her belongings—fur coats, jewels, dresses—in secret. “It was really sad, like what purgatory may be like,” she says with a laugh. “I couldn’t talk to the press, not even my mother, but they had to make sure I was for real.” After she entered the monastery and became a postulant, she wouldn’t take the habit of a nun
for at least another year. Meaning that, in addition to her promise of commitment and obedience, an interior realization that is cemented through a series of vows, she had to cut her golden shoulder-length curls, the very trait that—bound high in a girlish ponytail—helped her secure a studio contract with Paramount.
“When I was very small, my great-grandma used to say to me as she would brush her hair, ‘Don’t ever cut your hair, dear, until it’s really love,’ ” says Mother Dolores,
recalling the time she refused to chop her waist-grazing lengths for the role as a young aristocratic woman who leaves her family to become a nun in the 1961 historical drama Francis of Assisi. Much to the filmmakers’ dismay, Hart asked to grease her lengths down and put on a wig in order to fake the climactic ceremonial scene. “At the time, I just couldn’t do that for a movie—it had to be for something real...read more
