Maureen O'Hara

Born into an artistic family in Dublin, Ireland, Maureen Fitzsimmons- still as yet to become the ardent and captivating Maureen O’Hara of the big Hollywood screen- was encouraged at a very early age to pursue her early and impassioned interest in the arts. By the time she was ten, O’Hara was already actively involved in theater where she was mentored by the Irish dramatist Lennox Robinson. She won several accolades and awards for her theater performances before breaking into the film industry.

At the age of seventeen, O’Hara made her first screen test at Elstree studios in Ireland. Unfortunately, she was made up to the point where she looked years older and nothing like herself. It seemed to be a hopeless first venture into film. Thankfully, the English actor and director Charles Laughton (Witness for the Prosecution) and his business partner Erich Pommer (Metropolis) saw something in her. She was quickly signed to their production company, Mayflower Studios.

Her first real film role was in Little Miss Molly in 1938. She was still billed under her real name, and was still building her movie-star image. However, that innate, captivating beauty and spark was already there. It wasn’t long after that O’Hara got her first big film role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939). Despite being considered one of the director's worst films, O'Hara was praised for her performance. Laughton, who also starred with her in the film, liked her performance so much that she was cast as Esmeralda alongside his Quasimodo in William Dieterle's Hollywood production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939).

When World War II broke out in England, Mayflower Pictures could no longer film in London, so O’Hara signed with RKO in the U.S. Her time at RKO began with a series of forgettable roles that O'Hara struggled to capture as they were one dimensional and far removed from who she herself was. Her breakout performance came when John Ford cast her in his How Green Was My Valley (1941). This marked the start of an over twenty-year collaboration with the noteworthy director.

When the war broke out in America, too, O’Hara was once again left with few good co-stars and fewer good roles with only a few exceptions, such as in the action-adventure film The Black Swan (1942), with matinee idol Tyrone Power (The Mark of Zorro). Thankfully there were others. After leaving for Ireland, O'Hara was called back for the part of Doris Walker in the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Again, this was one of the few good exceptions along with others, like Sitting Pretty (1948) with Clifton Webb and Robert Young. Signed jointly to Fox and RKO, both studios for reasons of their own, continued to prohibit her from starring in more substantial roles. They just kept putting her in the same old Western and Adventure “stinkeroos,” as O’Hara liked to call them. She had no choice but to comply or be suspended.

O’Hara grew increasingly tired of being treated as the decorative female next to her male co-stars, but her natural beauty, vibrant auburn hair, green eyes, and cream-colored complexion were made for the Technicolor process. Some claimed this made her just a pretty face who was considered especially attractive when she simply let out her “Irish temper” and became explosive and fiery, but it’s not that simple. For one thing, doing that is not as easy as it looks. Perhaps this is why O’Hara had her greatest success with John Ford. He knew how to use her good-natured toughness, only exceeded perhaps by the likes of Barbara Stanwyck (Stella Dallas), to turn out a soulful and dynamic performance. Sometimes this fire came out when she was angry and other times in moments of quiet apprehension.

Under Ford, she also began her most memorable screen teaming with John Wayne (Stagecoach). Their first film together was in the western Rio Grande, the last film in Ford’s Cavalry trilogy, and later The Quiet Man (1952). She would go on to make The Wings of Eagles (1957), McLintock! (1963), and finally Big Jake (1971) with both of them. More opportunities came when she signed with Columbia in 1955, including another collaboration with John Ford in The Long Gray Line with previous co-star Tyrone Power. When she starred as the mother in Disney’s The Parent Trap (1961), O’Hara was able to transition to more mature roles, which then opened up more opportunities to play diverse characters, such as in Spencer’s Mountain (1963) with Henry Fonda and McLinktock! with Wayne. Maureen O’Hara retired in 1971 after filming Big Jake, and later became the CEO of her late husband’s airline before coming back to Hollywood in 1991 to star in Only the Lonely and a few other films before her death in 2015.

Despite a long and rather continuous string of less than notable films, O’Hara was still able to succeed and become a star in her own right. None of these bad films ever threatened her career. She was able to maintain a presence and continued to captivate audiences as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, working with the likes of Ford, Wayne, Power, William Wellman (The Public Enemy), Natalie Wood (Splendor in the Grass), Alec Guiness (The Bridge on the River Kwai), James Stewart (Vertigo), Frank Borzage (7th Heaven), and Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause), just to name a few. No matter what anyone says or thinks, you can’t help but watch a film and love it because Maureen O’Hara is in it! She is anything but just a pretty face!