Maureen O’Hara,
the Irish actress who starred in a slew of American films
including “Miracle on 34th Street,” “The Quiet Man” and “The
Parent Trap” and one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s golden age, died on Saturday at home in Boise, Idaho.
She was 95.
With her faint Irish
accent, bright red hair and air of independence, she was often
described as “fiery,” but that implies she was a one-note
personality; in truth, she was a real actress who displayed her
versatility in such works as “How Green Was My Valley” and
Carol Reed’s “Our Man in Havana.” She worked with directors
ranging from Alfred Hitchcock to Chris Columbus, but is best
remembered for her works with John Ford, particularly in her pairings
with John Wayne, such as “Quiet Man.”
She was one of the
few Wayne co-stars who could prove his match in screen presence. Her
“Quiet” character is prideful and stubborn, strong and
intelligent, the emblematic O’Hara role. One of her best
performances was in the 1940 proto-feminist film “Dance Girl
Dance,” directed by Dorothy Arzner and also starring Lucille
Ball. The highlight of the film is O’Hara silencing a
boorish audience of men at a burlesque show, in which she says,
basically, go ahead and smirk because we performers are smirking
right back at you.
In 2014, the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences presented her with an Honorary
Oscar at the Governors Awards. O’Hara, looking frail in her
wheelchair, read a statement of thanks, but when her onstage escort
started to take the microphone, it was clear she had not
lost her “fiery” streak: She held onto the mike and continued
talking with the unspoken subtext, “This is my moment, and I don’t
care about time constraints.”
O’Hara was born
Maureen FitzSimons in Ranelagh, a suburb of Dublin. Along with
several of her siblings, she received training in drama and dance;
she began appearing in amateur theater at the age of 10, and at 14
she was accepted to the Abbey Theater, where she began pursuing
classical theater and operatic singing.
Her movie career
began thanks to Charles Laughton: While she was still a teen, he
viewed a screen test she had made, and he and partner Erich Pommer
signed her to a seven-year contract with their company, Mayflower
Films.
She had small roles
in a couple of English films made in 1938 but made her first
significant bigscreen appearance was in Hitchcock’s Gothic
actioner “Jamaica Inn,” starring Laughton. The 18-year-old O’Hara
already displayed the kind of self-possession and self-reliance that
would be a trademark of her characters. Laughton was impressed and
cast her as Esmerelda the next year in his classic “The Hunchback
of Notre Dame,” shot at RKO in Hollywood.
When WWII began and
he realized lensing would no longer be possible in London, Laughton
sold O’Hara’s contract to RKO, which cast her in a trio of B
pictures. She still seemed somewhat uncertain of herself in a remake
of the Katharine Hepburn vehicle “Bill of Divorcement” but made
a big impression in “Dance, Girl, Dance,” while “They Met in
Argentina” was a musical trifle.
Director Ford lifted
O’Hara out of low-budget territory when he cast her in Fox’s 1941
“How Green Was My Valley,” which won the Oscar for best picture.
The image of O’Hara radiantly waving from a gate is one of the
enduring images in the film and has been used in an untold number of
movie montages.
During WWII she made
several films, several of them war pics in which she was just the
obligatory female interest, but she shined in a couple of
movies: In the excellent 1942 Technicolor swashbuckler “The Black
Swan,” she is gloriously outraged by the attentions of scoundrel
Tyrone Power; in John Garfield psychological thriller “The Fallen
Sparrow” (1943), she is a strong, elegant lady in jeopardy.
“The Black Swan”
would be the first of a number of pirate pics she made over the next
decade, including “The Spanish Main,” with Paul Henreid; “Sinbad
the Sailor,” with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; “At Sword’s Point,”
in which she got the opportunity to wield her own blade as the
daughter of a musketeer; and “Against All Flags,” with Errol
Flynn, in which her character, a female pirate, got to engage in her
share of the swordplay.
Hollywood legend
says that RKO planned to film “Spanish Main” in black and white
but switched to Technicolor because of O’Hara’s beautiful red
hair, green eyes and porcelain-white skin.
In 1947 she made
“Miracle on 34th Street” starring as Natalie Wood’s mother
who pooh-poohs her daughter’s belief in Santa Claus;
while it’s probably her most well-known film, the pic is
something of an odd duck in her career as her character quickly
transforms from hard-headed and skeptical to warmly sentimental.
In addition to
Westerns, the swashbucklers and the musicals, O’Hara made a film
noir, 1949’s “A Woman’s Secret,” with Melvyn Douglas and
Gloria Grahame.
During the 1950s she
paired four times with director Ford. The first was the Western “Rio
Grande,” a movie Ford agreed to make only if he could also do his
dream project, “The Quiet Man.” Both movies starred O’Hara and
Wayne, but O’Hara had far more to do in the latter. (And the part
gave her one of her few onscreen opportunities to speak in her own
Irish accent.)
The third Ford film
was “The Long Gray Line,” reunited O’Hara with Power. Set at
West Point, it nevertheless had a very Irish flavor. The final Ford
film, reuniting Wayne and O’Hara, was 1957 biopic “The Wings of
Eagles,” about a Navy pilot-turned-screenwriter. O’Hara and
Wayne, however, would work together again in 1963 Western comedy
“McLintock!” and 1971 Western “Big Jake.”
Films had not
provided an outlet for her love of singing, and in the late 1950s and
early ’60s she guested on TV variety shows. She also starred in the
tuner “Christine” on Broadway in 1960, and released two albums
the same year: “Love Letters From Maureen O’Hara” and “Maureen
O’Hara Sings Her Favorite Irish Songs.”
 |
| with John Wayne from "The Quiet Man" |
But she was still a
very busy movie actress, starring with Alec Guinness in Reed’s “Our
Man in Havana” in 1959, with Hayley Mills in “The Parent Trap”
in 1961, with Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation” in
1962 and with Henry Fonda in “Spencer’s Mountain” in 1963 (a
precursor of the TV series “The Waltons,” both autobiographical
works by Earl Hamner Jr.). Many of her films during this period were
comedies. In 1966 she starred with Stewart again in “The Rare
Breed.”
She also starring in
a version of “Mrs. Miniver” on CBS in 1960 and made other
television appearances.
O’Hara retired
from acting after making a TV version of “The Red Pony” with
Fonda in 1973, a few years after her third marriage, to Charles F.
Blair Jr., in 1968. Blair was a former U.S. Air Force brigadier
general and former chief pilot for Pan Am. (She had secretly married
George H. Brown, a film producer and scriptwriter, in 1939, but that
marriage was annulled two years later; she married American director
William Houston Price, dialogue director on “The Hunchback of Notre
Dame,” in 1941 but divorced him in 1953.)
Blair died in a
plane crash in 1978, and O’Hara was elected prexy-CEO of Antilles
Airboats, becoming the first woman president of a scheduled airline
in the U.S. Later she sold the airline.
O’Hara returned to
acting for a starring role in the 1991 Chris Columbus comedy “Only
the Lonely,” in which she played John Candy’s overbearing mother.
She also starred in
telepics “The Christmas Box” (1995), the well-reviewed “Cab to
Canada” and “The Last Dance” (2000).
After appearing in a
number of tributes to fellow actors and Hollywood-focused
documentaries over the years (including projects devoted to
Wayne and to Ford), O’Hara made her last screen appearance in the
2010 Irish docu “Dreaming the Quiet Man.”
O’Hara’s
autobiography, “’Tis Herself,” was published in 2004. In April
2014 the actress appeared at the TCM Classic Film Festival in
Hollywood.
Survivors include a
daughter and a grandson.
--- Extract from Variety
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