Maureen O'Hara: The Biography

Introduction

1 introduction They’ve built a statue to her in Kells. Her website receives 250,000 hits a day. every Christmas Day somebody in the world is watching Miracle on 34th Street, and every St. patrick’s Day somebody is watching The Quiet Man. Maureen O’Hara (née FitzSimons) occupies an unusual place in the film pantheon, in that she was never nominated for an Oscar, yet she’s the only irish actress to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She also worked with all the greats, both in front of the camera (Charles Laughton, Tyrone power, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, among others) and behind it (alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Jean renoir, Nicholas ray, Sam peckinpah). She always said that working with top-flight stars helped her to get the best out of herself. O’Hara’s belle époque was the 1940s and 1950s, when she occupied the front ranks of female action roles. The films she appeared in had an old-world simplicity, but that made them no less entertaining. She cantered across burning sands in a yashmak as a harem heroine and clambered up a ship’s rigging in hoopskirts as a love goddess–cum–pirate queen. “There was always a fight in them between me and someone else,” the rapier-slashing star told Joe Hyams in a 1959 Los Angeles Times interview, “usually another girl. That made up for the bad script.” in all these roles she leavened the exotic superstructures with a large dose of irish common sense. “Black is black and white is white,” she declared, “i never stand on middle ground.”1 She was good at taking her punishment in such ventures. She endured so many on-set injuries during her career that her colleagues joked she should have been awarded a purple Heart. The payoff was that she was rarely out of work. “i’ve never been without a contract,” was a frequent boast during her prime, “not for a split second. it’s better that way because 2 Maureen O’Hara i’ve always hated being in competition with other actresses for roles.” She also hated being idle, so she often settled for material that was unworthy of her. “Show me the actress who didn’t,” she challenged.2 Was O’Hara willing to diversify to secure better roles? grace Kelly was another irish ice queen from Hollywood’s golden age, but she forsook makeup to render herself suitably dowdy for The Country Girl and won an Oscar for her performance. Would O’Hara have been willing to do likewise? (Her famous hair remained a radiant red, even into her nineties.) Her critics accused her of having a limited range, but O’Hara begged to disagree. She seemed to struggle in comedic roles but proved her mettle in films that called on her to take charge of situations or find courage in the face of adversity. an indomitable coper with an iron will and an innate sense of the polarities of whatever conundrum she found herself in, she comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. The Quiet Man became the insignia of her career, but she appeared in many other noteworthy roles, especially in the early years. Films such as Jamaica Inn, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and How Green Was My Valley established her credentials and her captivating beauty. Other early highlights included the profound dramas The Fallen Sparrow and This Land Is Mine and, in the 1950s, two other John Ford offerings, The Long Gray Line and Wings of Eagles. She writes in her autobiography, “One critic, the bloody bastard, [said] that it took the likes of John Ford to drag a good performance out of me.”3 although O’Hara worked well with other directors, the only Oscar-nominated films she appeared in were by Ford. in the 1960s and 1970s she expanded her range to play “mature” women and also appeared in acclaimed TV films such as Mrs. Miniver and The Red Pony, when the dreaded “black box” ate into cinema profits and threatened to torpedo the genre. Versatility was one of her proudest traits. “i played every kind of role,” she declared. “i was never petite or cute so there was never anything about me that would go out of style.” But she never laid claim to genius. “i worked hard and always knew my lines.” She had no time for Method acting , which she dismissed as so much “tommyrot.”4 acting should...