Hollywood actress Dolores Hart aka Sister Dolores Hart is subject of 2012 Academy Award-nominated HBO documentary God is the Bigger Elvis

                         Hollywood actress Dolores Hart played Elvis Presley’s love interest and that of other leading men in ten popular movies from the 1950s and ‘60s.  Fast forward to 1970 when she “reinvented” herself and took her final vows as a Roman Catholic nun at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT, ultimately becoming the Prioress of the Monastery. Mother Prioress Dolores Hart is the subject of the 2012 Academy Award-nominated HBO documentary film, God is the Bigger Elvis, which will be screened by The Ridgefield Playhouse Film Society’s Documentary Film Series at The Ridgefield Playhouse on Friday, May 25, at 7:30 p.m., as a “New Horizons Renovation Project”
 fundraiser to benefit the Abbey of Regina Laudis. A post-screening Q&A, hosted by television personalities Ira Joe Fisher and Morton Dean, will feature Mother Prioress Dolores Hart. In addition, two CDs from the “Women in Chant” series featuring the nuns from the Abbey of Regina Laudis singing Gregorian chants will be on sale to further support the “New Horizons Renovation Project”. This event is sponsored by Cohen and Wolf, P.C., HBGroup, The Ridgefield Press and Sony XDCAM HC.

                          Mother Prioress Dolores Hart was an actress whose career was on the rise and who was engaged to marry an adoring fiancé when she chose to enter the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut and begin her new life as a Benedictine nun. Hart even made her Broadway debut winning a 1959 Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress for her role in The Pleasure of His Company. She starred in the hit movie Where The Boys Are in 1960. In 1961, she starred in the prophetic film Francis of Assisi, in which she played a nun.      

                  Directed by Rebecca Cammisa (of 2009's "Which Way Home"), the Oscar-nominated short documentary God Is the Bigger Elvis uses Hart's story as a way to gently examine what would lead a woman to choose the cloistered, strict lifestyle of a monastery in the contemporary age. The film, which premiered on HBO in February 2012, has an almost too-good-to-be-true subject in Hart, who has become Mother Prioress of the Abbey. With her warm, twinkly-eyed presence, she was a woman who seems to have had everything, including beauty, love, Hollywood contract offers and roles opposite actors Montgomery Clift, George Hamilton, Robert Wagner, Anthony Quinn and Elvis Presley.

               For reserved seating ($10.00 a portion of which goes to support the Abbey of Regina Laudis), call or visit the box office at (203) 438-5795, or go to ridgefieldplayhouse.org. The Ridgefield Playhouse is a not-for-profit performing arts center located at 80 East Ridge, parallel to Main Street, Ridgefield, CT