Despite leaving behind her fiancé, Los Angeles Architect, Don Robinson (April 16, 1933 – November 29, 2011), she left her acting career. Even though she broke off her engagement, they remained close friends: she admitted she loved him—"Of course, Don, I love you." But Robinson said, "Every love doesn't have to wind up at the altar." He never married, and visited her every year at Christmas and Easter at the abbey in Connecticut until his death.
Hicks converted to Catholicism when she was 10. By age 11, she was living again in Beverly Hills with her mother, a restaurant greeter, who married owner Al Gordon. After high school, she studied at Marymount College. Using the stage name of 'Dolores Hart' in 1956 she was signed to play a supporting role as the love interest to Elvis Presley in the 1957 release Loving You. After this appearance, Hart found herself in frequent demand, and she made two more films before appearing with Presley again in 1958's King Creole--Elvis' screen kiss debut). She has denied ever having had an 'intimate' relationship with Presley off-screen. In interviews during her movie career she was often asked, "What is it like kissing Elvis?" She chuckled a bit at the memory, "I think the limit for a screen kiss back then was something like 15 seconds. That one has lasted 40 years." Hart then made her debut on Broadway, winning a 1959 Theatre World Award as well as a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress for her role in The Pleasure of His Company.
In 1960 Hart starred in Where the Boys Are, a teenage comedy about college students on spring break, which developed a near cult-like following. In the film Hart plays a co-ed who struggles to define herself when confronted with her newly discovered sexuality and popularity with the opposite sex. Hart starred in the film, Francis of Assisi in 1961, in which she played Saint Clare of Assisi. Hart also made a Sketch of a St. Francis statue, arms outstretched, while working on the movie . She went on to star in four more films, including the lead role in The Inspector (Lisa) which was based on a novel by Jan de Hartog, which was nominated for a Golden Globe for "Best Picture – Drama".
Perhaps, an Example of slight foreshadowing of her soon to be religious life, in the western The Virginian, Hart played a Catholic missionary, who against all warnings, risks her life to honor both her vows to God and her Desire to continue her dead husband's work to help a community of poor and sick embattled Indian tribes in a 1963 episode entitled "The Mountain of the Sun". Hart's last role was with Hugh O'Brian in 1963's Come Fly with Me. At this point she had made up her mind to leave the film industry. The 24-year-old Actress became a Roman Catholic nun at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. On a 1963 New York promotional stop for Come Fly with Me, she took a one-way car ride to the abbey in 1963 (not in a limousine as reported).
As a novice, she told abbey founder, Lady Abbess Benedict Duss, "I will never have to worry again about being an Actress because it was all over and behind me." But Lady Abbess replied, "I'm sorry, but you're completely wrong. Now you have to take up a role and really work at it." Hart submitted a rejoinder, "I was so mad when she said that because I really emptied my pockets, so to speak, and literally had given away everything that had meant anything to me." The Abbess said, "I'm sorry you did that because there's a lot of things you gave away that you're going to need here." She initially took the religious name Sister Judith, but she changed it to Sister Dolores for her final vows. "Hal Wallis wanted to call me Susan when I started my movie career, but I was under age and my mother would not hear of it. She wanted me to be Dolores." She took her final vows in 1970. She chants in Latin eight times a day.
Hart was named prioress of the monastery in 2001, after the election of Mother David Serna as second abbess of Regina Laudis, and held that office until 2015. Hart remains a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, having in recent years become the only nun to be an Oscar-voting member.
Hart visited Hollywood again in 2006 after 43 years in the monastery to raise awareness for idiopathic peripheral neuropathy disorder, a neurological disorder that afflicts her and many Americans. In April 2006 she testified at a Washington congressional hearing on the need for research of the painful and crippling disease amid her ordeal.
On October 4, 2008, "The Holy Trinity Apostolate", founded by Rev. John Hardon, S.J., sponsored a "Breakfast with Mother Dolores Hart". Held at Rochester, Michigan's Royal Park Hotel, Hart told her story: "He Led Me Out into an Open Space; He Saved Me Because He Loved Me: The Journey of Mother Dolores Hart to Regina Laudis". Since 1963, when she joined the Bethlehem abbey, she disciplined herself under the Rule of Saint Benedict. At the breakfast, several people spoke, including Actress Patricia Neal and Maria Cooper Janis, the daughter of Hollywood leading man Gary Cooper.
A documentary film about Hart's life, God Is the Bigger Elvis, was a nominee for the 2012 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) and was shown on HBO in April 2012. Hart attended the 2012 Academy Awards for the documentary; her last red carpet Oscar event had been in 1959 as a Hollywood starlet.
In her autobiography, The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’ Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (Ignatius Press)—co-authored with lifelong friend Richard DeNeut and released May 7, 2013—Hart told her life story, from her birth in Chicago to becoming Catholic, from her Hollywood adventures to monastery life.
Hart, who was compared to Grace Kelly, was instrumental in developing her Abbey of Regina Laudis's project of expansion of its community connection through the arts, using her fame. Paul Newman helped her with funding for a lighting grid, when she envisioned a year-round arts school and a better-equipped stage. Another friend, the Academy Award winning Actress, Patricia Neal, helped support the abbey's theater. Hart's vision was to meet the abbey's needs—development and expansion of its open-air theater and arts program for the Bethlehem community. Every summer, the abbey's 38 nuns on 400 acres (1.6 km) of rural land, help the community stage a musical, with the 2008 presentation of West Side Story, after previous shows Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man and My Fair Lady.
Hart often appears in public wearing a beret on top of her habit. When asked about it by an interviewer she stated that early in her vocation because nuns have to "cut your hair quite short in order to get your cap on, your wimple, your bandeau, and all of that". She told her superior that "my head is freezing even when I put the veil on!" When informed that she could "put another veil on top of it" she thought "oh, that’s pretty dull isn’t it? And someone gave me a little tam, so I asked if I could wear that". She was granted permission "and now a lot of the young ones [novices and other nuns] pick up the beret [because] they like it, but it’s not actually part of our habit. It’s part of our tradition that what helps a nun to be herself can certainly [be] a part of our system."
