Maureen O’Hara, the fiery Irish-born actress who starred with John
Wayne in “The Quiet Man,” John Ford’s film about an American ex-boxer’s
unquiet retirement to his village birthplace in Ireland, has died. She
was 95. The Associated Press reported O’Hara’s death, citing her manager,
Johnny Nicoletti, who said the actress died in her sleep Saturday at her
home in Boise, Idaho.
Maureen
O'Hara accepts an Honorary Award during the Academy Of Motion Picture
Arts And Sciences' 2014 Governors Awards in Hollywood, on Nov. 8, 2014.
Photographer: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Trained
for the stage in her native Dublin, O’Hara made four other movies with
Wayne, including Ford’s “Rio Grande,” among her 55 films in a career
that spanned six decades. She also played the mother who tries to resist
believing in Santa Claus in “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947). Two of the five movies she made for Ford -- “How Green Was My Valley”
(1941) and “The Quiet Man” (1952) -- won Academy Awards for the
director, though she never received an Oscar nomination for her acting. O’Hara was presented with an honorary
Academy Award in November 2014 by Clint Eastwood and countryman Liam
Neeson, who called the actress’s talent “unsurpassed.” The academy cited
performances imbued with “passion, warmth and strength.” While O’Hara became a leading lady in black-and-white films, she rose
to stardom in the 1950s as Technicolor enhanced her flawless complexion
and abundant red hair. Aside from Wayne, she was paired on-screen with Tyrone Power, James
Stewart, Henry Fonda, Jeff Chandler and Anthony Quinn, to mention just a
few of her co-stars. She performed many of her own stunts in movies and, in addition to
Ford, worked with such famous directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed,
Henry Hathaway and Jean Renoir. Off-screen, her temperament sometimes made headlines. She balked at
her U.S. naturalization hearing in 1946 when she was described as a
British subject rather than an Irish citizen; her protest triggered a
change in U.S. policy.
Candid Account
Later, she was equally candid in discussing
her 15-year romance with a married man, as well as her marriages and her
leading men, in “’Tis Herself: A Memoir,” written with Nicoletti in
2004. Born Maureen FitzSimons on Aug. 17, 1920, she was the second of six
children in a tight-knit, high-achieving family. Her mother was a former
actress, and one of her brothers became a Hollywood television
producer. She performed in radio plays at 13 and a year later joined Ireland’s
famed Abbey Theatre, where she swept floors and painted sets before
moving on to speaking roles. Still in her teens, she was cast opposite Charles Laughton in
Hitchcock’s “Jamaica Inn” (1939), a thriller for which she adopted the
stage name O’Hara. Laughton chose her to play Esmeralda when he starred in “The
Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1939), the movie that brought O’Hara to
Hollywood before the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Studio
contracts, marriage and childbirth intervened before she saw Ireland
again seven years later. “Whether I liked it or not, I was now a property of the powerful
Hollywood studio system,” she wrote in her memoir. Though she had a
brief run in a 1960 Broadway musical, the actress never fulfilled her
ambitions for a stage career.
Ford’s Favorite
After “Hunchback,” O’Hara appeared in 50
movies from 1940 until 1971, some of them forgettable. She shone,
though, in the five movies directed by Ford, beginning with “How Green
Was My Valley,” the epic about Welsh coal miners. O’Hara’s first marriage, as a teenager, was annulled in 1941. A daughter, Bronwyn, was born in 1944 after a second marriage, which ended in divorce in 1952. In 1968, she married Charles F. Blair Jr., a former reserve Air Force
general and Pan American World Airways pilot. Blair retired to St.
Croix in the Virgin Islands and then ran Antilles Air Boats, a commuter
airline. After her husband died in a 1978 plane crash, O’Hara headed the
airline briefly before selling the business to Resorts International. O’Hara returned to a motion-picture set in 1991, after a 20-year
hiatus, to play a tough Irish mother to actor John Candy in “Only the
Lonely.” She said she enjoyed the experience and went on to appear in
“The Christmas Box” (1995), a sentimental made-for-TV movie, and two
other television movies when she was in her late 70s
Maureen O’Hara, Feisty Actress in ‘Quiet Man, ’ Dies at 95, Maureen
O’Hara, Feisty Actress in ‘Quiet Man, Maureen O’Hara, Feisty Actress.
