Actress
Born August 17, 1920;
Died: October 24, 2015
MAUREEN O'Hara, who has died aged 95, was one of the last great stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. The Irish-born redhead was considered one of the world's most beautiful women and played feisty heroines in a range of films from swashbucklers to serious dramas.
Her film career began before the Second World War in England and she was the leading lady in Alfred Hitchcock's period adventure Jamaica Inn (1939). In Hollywood she co-starred in five films with John Wayne, including three westerns.
But their best-loved film together is probably The Quiet Man, the knockabout romantic comedy that brought O'Hara back to her native Ireland in 1951 and which still retains a devoted following and attracts new viewers, as well as a steady flow of visitors to the little village of Cong, in County Mayo.
In an age when many leading ladies were feminine rather than feminist, O'Hara could just about hold her own against the macho legend that was John Wayne … just about, not quite, being unceremoniously dragged across the Irish countryside in The Quiet Man and ending up over his knee and being spanked with a shovel in the western McLintock! (1963).
The second of six children, Maureen O'Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons, into a middle-class family in the suburbs of Dublin. Her father ran the Irish operations of a British company that made hats. Her mother designed clothes and had her own manufacturing business.
Her mother was Protestant, but converted to Catholicism, and the children were raised as Catholics. The eldest daughter became a nun, but Maureen always wanted to be an actress, went to classes in drama, music and dance from the age of six and was appearing in amateur theatre at ten.
She recalled in her autobiography 'Tis Herself (1997) that she was big for her age and played camogie (the women's version of hurling) and "excelled in fencing, and so was later able to hold my own with Cornel Wilde and Errol Flynn in my swashbuckler pictures".
In her early teens she joined the famous Abbey Theatre, starting at the bottom sweeping floors and painting scenery. She also went to business school and trained in bookkeeping and typing. She was cast in her first lead role at 17.
But she was called away before opening night for a screen test in London and she eventually signed a seven-year contract with Mayflower Pictures, a company set up by the film star Charles Laughton. She had a supporting role in the musical My Irish Molly (1938) under her original name.
Laughton then cast her in Jamaica Inn as a young Irish woman who turns up in Cornwall and upsets the smooth running of his operation luring ships onto the rocks, killing the crews and stealing whatever is on board. But he did not care much for the name FitzSimons and told her to choose O'Hara or O'Mara as an alternative. When she refused, he chose for her.
Jamaica Inn has the distinction of being both her first major role and Hitchcock's last film in England before he went to Hollywood. It was also the first of Hitchcock's three Daphne du Maurier adaptations, the others being Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963).
And it was the film on which O'Hara met her first husband the producer George H Brown. They married in secret in June 1939, when O'Hara was still only 18. The marriage was annulled a couple of years later.
O'Hara and Laughton also starred together as Esmeralda and Quasimodo in a memorable version of The Hunchbank of Notre Dame, which shot not in Paris, but during a very hot summer on sets in California. It established O'Hara as one of Hollywood's most exciting new stars.
On Hunchback she met her second husband Will Price, who was dialogue director on the film, though he would later become a director. They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, though that marriage also ended in divorce. O'Hara later claimed he was abusive.
She first worked with John Ford on his Welsh mining drama How Green Was My Valley (1941), which again recreated European settings in California. It won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Other memorable films followed – Buffalo Bill (1944), in which she played the legendary scout's wife; Sinbad, the Sailor (1947), with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947); and Rio Grande (1950), which reunited her with John Ford and began her working relationship with John Wayne.
Colour was becoming increasingly popular and certainly benefitted O'Hara, with her blazing red hair and striking green eyes. She was dubbed the Queen of Technicolor. Ken Wlaschin, author of The World's Great Movie Stars and Their Films (1979), wrote: "Her hot-tempered Irish personality enlivened even drab pictures and colourless leading men."
In 1968 she married for a third time and she made only a few more films after that. Her third husband was the aviator Charles Blair, a former US Air Force general and Pan Am pilot, who set up the company Antilles Air Boats. He was killed in a plane crash in 1978 and O'Hara became chief executive of the company.
After an absence from the cinema of almost 20 years she made a comeback in 1991 as John Candy's overbearing Irish mother in the comedy Only the Lonely.
She had dual Irish-US nationality and had homes in Arizona and the US Virgin Islands (where Antilles Air Boats was based), but latterly spent most of her time in County Cork.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
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