Profile Maureen O'Hara: Sixty films and 84 years on, Maureen O'Hara, who has just published her memoirs, still radiates star quality. It's hard to believe she's never won an Oscar, writes Michael Dwyer
Two weeks ago, Maureen O'Hara was the subject of a specialist round on the BBC2 quiz series, Mastermind. This week she is the subject of a tribute programme at Galway Film Fleadh, which culminates tomorrow afternoon in a public interview with her at the Town Hall Theatre, followed by a civic reception. And her memoirs, 'Tis Herself, recently published in the US, will be in Irish bookshops from September.
The New York Times review of that book noted: "Maureen O'Hara embodied the feisty red-headed spitfire, and came by that image honestly . . . She was blessed with beauty and a tomboy's sturdiness." One of Hollywood's best-loved actresses, she will be 84 next month and has appeared in 60 movies during a career spanning from My Irish Molly in 1938 to the US TV movie, The Last Dance, in 2000.
The Mastermind questions began by asking in what part of Dublin she was born, and the answer is Ranelagh on the south side of the city. When I interviewed her some years ago and asked the same question, she was even more specific, noting that she was baptised "up on the top of Beechwood Avenue at the Church of the Holy Name" and adding that, as a young girl, she frequently met Maud Gonne McBride in the same church.
She was born Maureen Fitzsimons and she says as far back as she can remember she always wanted to be an actress. "From when we were little tiny things, my older sister Peggy and I used to sit out on the grass and she would say she was going to be the most famous reverend mother in the world, and I'd say I was going to be the most famous actress in the whole world." In 1932, at the age of 12, Maureen made her professional acting début on radio; two years later she was performing with the Dublin Operatic Society and had enrolled at the Abbey Theatre. A chance meeting with film producer Harry Richman led to a screen test in London, and she was spotted by the great English actor, Charles Laughton, who changed her surname from Fitzsimons to O'Hara and cast her in the 1939 release Jamaica Inn, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Laughton, who also co-produced it.
Laughton was contracted to play the title role in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and he offered his protégée the co-starring role of Esmeralda. "So I went out to Hollywood," she recalls, "and because I was under 18 at the time, I had to have a parent with me so I could get a work permit. My mother came with me and we planned to come straight back after the film was finished." They travelled out on the Queen Mary, but her mother returned alone to Dublin and her five other children when Maureen turned 18 and the rising young star decided to stay on. Those were tough early days for an 18-year-old Dublin girl in Los Angeles, while war was being waged in Europe, and she admits to being desperately lonely and homesick at the time.
She persevered, however, and her tenacity and determination won out when she attracted a succession of leading roles for such notable directors as Jean Renoir and John Ford, and opposite many of the leading male stars of the era - John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power and Rex Harrison.
She made five films for Ford, himself the son of Irish immigrants, and in her memoirs she notes that Ford demanded unquestioning loyalty, that he was alternately sentimental and abusive, and that he once punched her in the face.
They made five films together, three of them co-starring John Wayne, including her most famous film and her personal favourite, The Quiet Man (1952), which was filmed in the west of Ireland. She and Wayne were best friends, and when we met, she proudly produced an old newspaper cutting in which Wayne declares her "a real friend like a man should be - absolutely marvellous - and definitely my kind of woman". In her book she expresses her disdain for Rex Harrison and James Stewart, and for Walt Disney. However, when we met, she said it was a pleasure to work with most of her male co-stars, particularly Wayne. "They were strong and tough, and I'm strong and tough, so we were able to stand toe to toe together and we had great respect for each other. Because I wasn't a delicate little female, we got on."
Maureen O'Hara's flaming red hair often led to her being cast as feisty, fiery-tempered characters. "You must know what it's like," she told me. "I think we red-haired people get blamed for all the short tempers in the world, but I only lost my temper once and that was with John Wayne on The Quiet Man. He and Ford were nagging me to death and I just about had it with the two of them. I had to do the scene where Wayne throws a rock through my kitchen window and grabs me and kisses me, and I had to hit him.
"If you watch the film you'll see how I hauled back and I really went for it. But he saw it coming and put his hand up. My hand snapped off the top of his fingers, and I broke a bone in my wrist. My fingers swelled up like sausages and I hid them in my red petticoat!"
There were very few women directing films in Hollywood in those days, although Maureen O'Hara had the starring role, as an aspiring ballerina, in director Dorothy Azner's fine 1940 movie, Dance, Girl, Dance. O'Hara says that she herself often contemplated turning director. "I would love to have directed adventure movies, westerns, strong movies with lots of stunts, but not like those special effects things you have today. I even bought a couple of scripts, but then I got married and I decided to chuck it all in."
Her first marriage to director George Hanley Brown was annulled and her second, to another director, Will Price, ended in divorce. In 1968 she married retired brigadier-general Charles Blair, who was the first pilot to fly solo over the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole. He also flew the first and the last of the flying boats out of Foynes, Co Limerick, and she is a patron of the Foynes Flying Boat Museum.
Three years after they married, after she finished co-starring with John Wayne in Big Jake, O'Hara quit movies. "It was time I married a wonderful man," she said, "and I didn't want to waste a minute of it. It was the best thing to ever happen to me in my life." They lived in the Virgin Islands and were regular visitors to their summer home in Glengarriff, Co Cork. Sadly, Charles Blair was killed in a plane crash in 1978.
"I never intended to go back to acting again," she insists. However, in 1990, Chris Columbus, the director of the hugely successful Home Alone movies, persuaded her to return to the film set for Only the Lonely.
She no longer had an agent at the time, but Columbus eventually got the script to her brother, film producer Charlie Fitzsimons, who was then the executive director of the Producers' Guild and who died three years ago.
"Charlie read the script and said I'd be a damned fool if I didn't do it," she recalls. "He sent it to me under my protest, but I read it and I had to agree with him." In the summer of 1991 she attended the gala Irish première of Only the Lonely which, at her request, was held in Limerick with proceeds going to the Foynes museum.
She was cast in the film as the conservative, domineering Irish-American mother of a shy and still single Chicago police officer, who was played by the late John Candy. She responded to the role in a glowing, thoroughly engaging performance, one of her very best, and she was widely tipped to secure an Oscar nomination for it, but this was not to be.
One of the many anomalies of Hollywood is that so many remarkable talents have been overlooked in the Academy Awards down the years, and it is hard to credit that Maureen O'Hara, an actress who radiated star quality, never received a single Oscar nomination throughout her career. An honorary Oscar to her at next year's ceremony would be entirely appropriate - andpopular with film lovers around the world and across the film industry.