Maureen O’Hara

Maureen O’Hara (born August 17, 1920, Rathmines and Rathgar township, County Dublin, Ireland—died October 24, 2015, Boise, Idaho, U.S.) was an Irish-American actress known for her portrayals of willful women.

FitzSimons was the second of six children born to the manager of a hat manufacturer and his wife, a fashion designer and sometime opera singer and actress. She began acting as a child, and, after a series of victories in amateur acting contests, she was hired to perform plays on the Irish national radio station. In 1934 she was accepted to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where she spent the following three years. While having dinner at a hotel, she was noticed by American singer Harry Richman, who recommended her for a screen test at a London film studio. The test was seen by English actor Charles Laughton, and he and his business partner, Erich Pommer, signed her to a seven-year contract with their production company, Mayflower Pictures. Having previously delivered only a single line in Kicking the Moon Around (1938; U.S. title, The Playboy), FitzSimons graduated to a slightly larger role in My Irish Molly (1938; U.S. title, Little Miss Molly).

She then appeared as the niece of a smuggler in Jamaica Inn (1939), an Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel that also starred Laughton as the mastermind of the smuggling ring. At that time she adopted O’Hara as her stage name (at Laughton’s suggestion), and she appeared as Maureen O’Hara thereafter. Next the young actress played Esmeralda to Laughton’s Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Laughton then sold O’Hara’s contract to RKO Pictures—the studio that had produced Hunchback—in an effort to save Mayflower from bankruptcy.

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Her work in RKO’s 1940 remake of A Bill of Divorcement was critically praised, but it was not until the John Ford picture How Green Was My Valley (1941)—about the travails of a family of Welsh miners—that O’Hara was able to showcase her talent for evincing hard-headed women. In 1942 she appeared in the pirate adventure The Black Swan. Her tough demeanour, combined with her athleticism and willingness to do her own stunts, led to her casting in a series of further swashbucklers. As a result, she was dubbed “the pirate queen.” O’Hara proved herself to be an adaptable performer, though, playing a double-crossing German spy in The Fallen Sparrow (1943) as well as the eminently practical mother of Natalie Wood’s cynical character in Miracle on 34th Street (1947).

O’Hara continued working with Ford, who cast her opposite western icon John Wayne in several films, including Rio Grande (1950), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Wings of Eagles (1957). She demonstrated her ability to hold her own on-screen with appearances as Lady Godiva in Lady Godiva of Coventry (1955) and as the title character in a television remake of Mrs. Miniver (1960). O’Hara also played the mother of Hayley Mills’s romantically meddlesome twins in The Parent Trap (1961). In 1963 she reunited with Wayne in McLintock!, in which she played the estranged wife of his character. She paired with Wayne a final time in the 1971 kidnapping drama Big Jake.

After her marriage (1968) to a former U.S. Air Force brigadier general, O’Hara’s on-screen appearances tapered off. She moved to the Virgin Islands, where she and her husband managed a small airline. Following his death in 1978, O’Hara headed the company until 1981. She made occasional returns to acting, notably in the comedy Only the Lonely (1991) and in the television movie The Last Dance (2000). In 2015 she received an honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.