Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Maureen O'Hara, 95, swashbuckling leading lady

To hear her tell it, leading lady Maureen O'Hara, who died Saturday at her home in Boise, Idaho, at the age of 95, punched, scrapped and swashbuckled her way through the movies in the heyday of Technicolor and CinemaScope.

To hear her tell it, leading lady Maureen O'Hara, who died Saturday at her home in Boise, Idaho, at the age of 95, punched, scrapped and swashbuckled her way through the movies in the heyday of Technicolor and CinemaScope.

On screen and in life the strapping, flame-haired, hazel-eyed colleen knelt only before God, most typically standing shoulder-to-shoulder with frequent costar John Wayne or second husband, Brig. Gen. Charles Blair, whose accomplishments were colorful enough for at least 10 Wayne/O'Hara adventures.

This prickliest of Irish roses began her movie career as the lust object in Charles Laughton's pirate yarn Jamaica Inn (1938) and ended it playing John Candy's smothering mother in Only the Lonely (1991). In between she appeared in an immodest number of movie classics.

Famously she was the Welsh bride who marries for money in How Green Was My Valley, the mom who shakes hands with Santa in Miracle on 34th Street, the strong-willed cavalry wife in Rio Grande, the lass who fights for her dowry in The Quiet Man and the divorceé whose twin daughters reunite her with Dad in The Parent Trap.

Born Maureen FitzSimons in Dublin on August 17, 1920, Miss O'Hara was a star with both a lovely face and a lively form. Instead of lamenting that producers wanted her only as a decorative object, she remodeled herself into an action heroine.

Usually in the films of her era when an attractive lady entered the scene the story would stop, all the better to appraise her assets. Not so with Miss O'Hara, who was nimble and athletic and moved so confidently that her audience (not to mention her costars) grew breathless trying to catch up with her. This earthiest of glamour girls kept the story rolling.

Dainty she was not. Nicknamed "the baby elephant," Miss O' Hara was the second eldest in a musical family she described as "the Irish von Trapps." Her parents, respectively a coutourier and haberdasher possessed of opera-caliber voices, pushed the children to develop their artistic talents.

At 14 Miss O'Hara joined Dublin's legendary Abbey Theatre, incubator of Irish dramatists and actors, winning leading roles by the time she was 17. Her fiery hair and changeable eyes captivated Laughton, who mentored her, instructing that on screen she didn't need to play to back row, that the flick of an eyelash carried the same weight as a stage swoon.

After her initiation in a low-budget musical called My Irish Molly, Laughton prevailed upon Alfred Hitchcock to cast her in Jamaica Inn (1939). Acceding to agent pressure, she bobbed her surname (appropriating that of a certain popular literary heroine), but flatly refused to bob her nose.

Dubbed "the girl with the black-cherry eyes," she came to Hollywood, playing Esmeralda to Laughton's Quasimodo in the 1939 remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The shooting schedule prevented her from taking the role in Hitchcock's Rebecca that made a star of Joan Fontaine.

Miss O'Hara made a strong impression in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) and in a series of lush color spectaculars such as The Black Swan (1942), where she essayed the part of the Jamaican governor's daughter rescued by former pirate Tyrone Power.

One O'Hara performance overlooked at the time has since become a cult classic: Her role as the aspiring ballerina working at a grindhouse in Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). Fed up with playing the stooge to Lucille Ball's burlesque queen, Miss O'Hara confronts the trenchcoat-wearing men in the audience, ogling them the way they ogle her.

During the 1940s Miss O'Hara reigned as the "Queen of Technicolor," playing Missus Cody to Joel McCrea's Mister in Buffalo Bill (1943), Contessa Francesca in The Spanish Main (1945) and Princess Marjan in Bagdad (1949). Typecast as the object that men dueled over, she recast herself as the dueler, playing the lady musketeer in At Sword's Point (1952) and a pirate captain in Against All Flags (same year).

Miss O'Hara's definitive role was as spitfire Mary Kate Danaher in John Ford's The Quiet Man (also 1952), a rollicking yarn that teamed her with John Wayne as a Yank in the storybook Irish village of Cong. What makes the romance work in this film (which boasts one of the greatest kisses in movie history) is that the leads - hardheaded, big-hearted brawlers - are so evenly matched. Legend has it that Ford called the character Mary Kate as a tribute to Miss O'Hara (Maureen is a variant of Mary) and Katharine Hepburn, athletic redheads with whom he was smitten.

Miss O'Hara's lovely singing voice won her an offer to play Anna in the movie musical The King and I. She was rejected by composer Richard Rodgers, who couldn't see a pirate queen in the part and was replaced by Deborah Kerr, whose voice was dubbed.

For the better part of the 1950s and 1960s, Miss O'Hara played a man's woman in action films such as The Magnificent Matador (1955, with Anthony Quinn), The Wings of Eagles (1957, with Wayne) McLintock! (1963, with Wayne giving her a spanking), Spencer's Mountain (same year, with Henry Fonda) and The Rare Breed (1966, with James Stewart).

After the annulment to her 1939 marriage to countryman George H. Brown, she married twice. In 1941 she wed dialogue coach Will Price, with whom she had a daughter, Bronwyn. Their union, plagued by his stints in rehab clinics for alcoholism, ended in divorce in 1953. In 1968 she married aviation legend Charles Blair, establishing homes in St. Croix and Ireland. He died in a plane crash ten years later.

Wayne, with whom she made five films and who was one of her closest friends, once paid her a compliment that could serve as her epitaph. He called her "one helluva dame."

She is survived by her daughter, Bronwyn FitzSimons of Glengarriff, Ireland; her grandson, Conor FitzSimons of Boise and two great-grandchildren.