Hooker, Helen O'Malley Roelefs (1905–93), sculptor, was born 1 January 1905 in Connecticut, USA, third among four daughters of Elon Huntingdon Hooker (1869–1938), chemical engineer and businessman, and his wife Blanche (1871–1956), daughter of Dexter Mason Ferry, a wealthy Detroit businessman. The Hookers counted six governors of Connecticut and Massachusetts among their ancestors, and Elon Hooker, who founded the successful Hooker Electrochemical Co. c.1902, was wealthy and entrepreneurial in his own right. Helen's upbringing was privileged and moneyed. She graduated from Miss Chaplin's School in New York in 1923 and that year won the American national junior tennis championship; thereafter she was rated tenth in the tennis tables. However, she was also artistic – modelling her first sculpture, a rabbit, at the age of six – and strong-minded, and determined not to follow the conventional family tradition of formal college education. In New York she studied sculpture with Mahonri Young, William Zorach, and Edmond Amateis, and in Paris at La Grande Chaumière with Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. Her travels were extensive: she studied woodcarving in Germany, dance and sculpture in Greece, theatre design in Moscow, and painting in Leningrad, after which an exhibition of her watercolours was held at the Darien art guild in Connecticut (1930). She held a further exhibition at the national art club in New York (1933). That year she fell in love with the former IRA member and writer Ernie O'Malley (qv), who was originally denied access to the house by her father. However, the couple married (27 September 1935) in London at Marylebone registry office. The New York society papers reported the event, noting that Helen's younger sister had married a Rockefeller.
The O'Malleys settled first in 229 Upper Rathmines Road, Dublin, moving (autumn 1937) to Co. Mayo. In November 1938, thanks to financial assistance from Helen's father, they began renting Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, Co. Mayo, and three years later bought it, together with forty acres, all in Helen's name. In 1942 she bought a further thirty acres and thus had a seventy-acre farm, which she worked on enthusiastically. She and her husband also built up an impressive art collection, including works by the Irish artists Jack Yeats (qv), Evie Hone (qv), Mainie Jellett (qv), Paul Henry (qv), and Nano Reid (qv), the English artists John Piper and Henry Moore, and the Europeans Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Rouault. As well as bringing up their three children, both O'Malleys also pursued their careers, he as writer and she as artist. Her work was first shown in Ireland in 1943 with ‘Island woman’ appearing at the Irish exhibition of Living Art and ‘A portrait of Mrs Kiernan’ at the RHA. Between 1944 and 1948 she showed a further seven works at the Living Art exhibitions. In December 1943 she built a studio at Burrishoole but this did not lead to her spending more time there; in autumn 1944 she bought a house at 15 Whitebeam Avenue, Clonskeagh, Dublin, and turned to theatre design work for the Players' Theatre, a new company founded by former Abbey actors. By this time her marriage was suffering: O'Malley considered her spendthrift and undisciplined; she found him remote and intransigent. In late 1946 she asked for a divorce, which she could obtain in the United States. For the next four years she divided her time between Connecticut and Dublin, where she had her first one-woman show in St Stephen's Green Gallery (1950), in which she showed heads of the author Liam O'Flaherty (qv) and the playwright Denis Johnston (qv). The Dublin Magazine (Oct.–Dec. 1950) noted that she was ‘in the academic tradition as a sculptor. She models well and surely; and in her straight portraiture shows excellent feeling for character. She is not so successful when she attempts to simplify or formalise which, admittedly, she does rarely.’ That year Hooker separated acrimoniously from O'Malley – the divorce was obtained in 1952 – and took, without his consent, their two eldest children to live in Colorado Springs, USA. The youngest remained in Ireland with his father. In 1956 Hooker married Richard Roelefs and settled in Connecticut. Three years previously she had had her first American exhibition of sculptures at the Taylor Museum, Colorado.
After 1960 she spent six months of the year in Ireland, to which she remained strongly attached, writing: ‘I have made my name as an artist in Dublin . . . My best years I gave to Ireland with all my heart and my soul’ (English, 66). She continued her practice of modelling famous Irish figures: her subjects included Mary Lavin (qv) in 1971, Eavan Boland, Austin Clarke (qv), Dana, and Éamon de Valera (qv) in 1972. De Valera did not sit for her, but after having tea with him for twenty minutes, she repaired immediately to a Dublin hotel where she reportedly worked for thirty-six hours, modelling from memory. The model went to America for casting. A portrait of Patrick Carey (qv) was shown at the RHA in 1974 but in general she exhibited more in the States than in Ireland. A retrospective exhibition (1973) at Fairfield Court, Greenwich, Connecticut, was sponsored by the American-Irish Historical Society, and in 1980 she showed eighteen pieces, cast in polyester resin from plaster originals, at the Birmingham museum of art, Alabama. Five years later the Ferguson Library, Stamford, Conn., hosted an exhibition of twenty-one portraits, including one of Seamus Heaney. Her subjects included Samuel Beckett (qv), James Galway, and Sean O'Casey (qv).
In Ireland she proved a generous patron of the arts, donating to the NLI 434 photographic prints, taken by herself and O'Malley, of ancient monastic sites, scenic views, and informal portrait photographs. With the collaborative sponsorship of the Irish American Cultural Institution she established the O'Malley collection of paintings by other artists, part of which is on permanent loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, with the remainder in the care of Mayo county council. It was her original wish to have a museum built in Mayo to display the collection (valued at $300,000 in 1978), but this did not come about.
She died in Greenwich, Conn., on 2 April 1993, having been predeceased by both husbands. In September 1993 the Helen Hooker O'Malley Roelefs Sculpture Trust was officially inaugurated at the University of Limerick. It includes for permanent display all forty-one heads and figures of her Irish portraits.