August 17, 2010. Copyright 2010, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Redheaded Irish actress from Hollywood's "Golden Age", Maureen O'Hara turns 90
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, August 17, Graphic News:  Of the six children born to Charles and Marguerita FitzSimons of Dublin, in the decade after the First World War, only the eldest -- Peggy, who became a nun -- resisted stage school. The rest, led by their big sister, Maureen, danced and sang their way through childhood, Maureen gaining a place at the prestigious Abbey Theatre School in the Irish capital when she was just 14. But while one brother became a television producer and two other siblings successful jobbing actors, it was sporty tomboy Maureen who was to be the star of the family she later described as "the most remarkable and eccentric I could possibly have hoped for".
Remembered now for classics such as Miracle on 34th Street -- made in 1947 and still a Thanksgiving favourite with the American NBC network -- along with the five movies in which she co-starred with the late John Wayne, it was an early introduction to Charles Laughton, who saw her first screen test, recorded in London when she was 19, which launched her career.
 
Englishman Laughton -- a successful actor, producer and screenwriter by the time he spotted Maureen -- signed her up, changed her name (O'Hara would fit more easily onto billboards) and persuaded director Alfred Hitchcock she should play the orphaned Mary Yellen in the 1939 British adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel, Jamaica Inn. As soon as filming was over, Laughton took O'Hara to Hollywood and cast her as Esmerelda to his Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, released the day Hitler invaded Poland, heralding the start of hostilities in Europe. O'Hara was able to continue working through the war years -- though not for Laughton, who had to sell her unfinished contract to the American film company, RKO Pictures, after losing his London studio -- and met John Ford, now considered one of the greatest directors in cinematic history.  Also of Irish descent, Ford had a reputation as a prickly character, but is said to have counted O'Hara his favourite actress. She appeared in his 1941 Oscar winner, How Green Was My Valley, playing a miner's daughter who falls in love with the village preacher.
 
Firmly rejecting the starlet stereotype, O'Hara's appeal -- to directors like Ford as well as the audiences of the 1940s and 50s -- was her feisty, physical performances. In films such as The Black Swan (1942), a swashbuckling adventure story co-starring Tyrone Power, she performed her own fencing stunts in the sword fight scenes. "The studio thought I was crazy...but I loved it", she recalls in her 2004 autobiography, Tis Herself. It was this athleticism and steely core that made O'Hara the perfect leading lady for tough-guy icon John Wayne. Ford directed them in Rio Grande (1950) and The Wings of Eagles (1957), but it was the story of American boxer Sean Thornton -- played by Wayne -- returning to his native Ireland to find love at first sight in O'Hara's spirited spinster, Mary Kate Danaher, that made The Quiet Man (1952) one of the best-loved films of its era. The couple remained friends until his death in June 1979, O'Hara saluting Wayne as "one of the greatest ambassadors for the United States that ever lived".

Guest appearances on TV shows in the 1960s allowed O'Hara to return to her first love, singing. She performed alongside crooners such as Perry Como and Andy Williams. Married three times, she has one daughter. Her third husband, aviator Charles Blair, was killed in a plane crash in 1978, leaving her to take over his airline, which she later sold. O'Hara owns a house in County Cork and once told U.S. chat show host Larry King that she intends to live to 102.
/ENDS