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 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 be acting, in her view, not “becoming” the role. She placed a high value on punctuality and was always perfectly coiffed and made up before the cameras rolled.
She was loved for her naturalness, her lack of a diva quality. She didn't make an entrance, like Marlene Dietrich or Joan Crawford; she simply entered. Acting was the shy woman's revenge for her. In Cong in 1951 people chatted to her as if she were one of the extras on The Quiet Man, instead of its female lead. She mixed with kings but never lost the common touch.
Another accusation was that she “made nice” with the studio bosses to gain better parts and more money. This she also hotly disputed, claiming it was never the FitzSimons way to be meek or sweet and that money was never a priority for her. Nonetheless, Darryl F. Zanuck liked to advertise the fact that O'Hara was the highest paid actress on his lot, at $5,000 a week. If she was friendly with Zanuck and Harry Cohn and others, it was because of her naturally cordial disposition rather than any ulterior motive. She always told the executives what she thought of them, she insisted, but what she thought was usually complimentary.
Despite the aforementioned temper, she was blessed with a balanced personality. “I've never walked off a set,” she boasted. “I've never had a temperamental fit in my life. I think I cooperate too much.”5 In fact, she did vacate the set on one occasion—while making Ten Gentlemen from West Point with the lascivious George Montgomery—but she wasn't being a diva. Montgomery had made a pass at her, and she was righteously indignant.
O'Hara was always more heroine than rebel. If you scratched the firebrand, you found the conformist. This was probably the result of her upbringing; domestic stability was the keynote, and an ideal evening was one spent singing and listening to classical airs. Religion was also a huge element in her life. She rarely missed Mass and was a God-fearing woman. On film sets, though, a different personality emerged. “I enjoyed tough directors,” she claimed, “who didn't waste time with politeness and that sort of nonsense. We got right down to work.”6 When they did, she gave as good as she got, parlaying her natural vim and vinegar into innumerable set pieces.
As she made clear in her most talismanic role, “I'm not a woman to be honked at and come running…. We Danahers are a fightin' family.” She objected to the clichéd depiction of redheaded women as spitfires, despite the fact that she was one herself. She liked opinionated people, even those with a tinge of nastiness and temper—all the things women aren't supposed to be. As regards her bossy image, she admitted it was true but claimed she didn't always get her way.
Her ambition wasn't to change the world; she wanted career stability and a boatload of kids. Like most ambitions, O'Hara's were realized only in part. She had one child and a stop-and-go career characterized by identikit action films and some thought-provoking dramas. Ruth Barton wrote that O'Hara's career could be understood only against the background of a controlling studio system that “fetishized” the strong female while simultaneously working to undermine her.7
She shunned the party lifestyle of Hollywood. Neither a drinker nor a smoker, she felt uneasy in the company of either. (A strong cup of tea was her preferred beverage, and her friends constantly complained about the lack of ashtrays in her house.) “If Clara Bow is the ‘It’ Girl,” she giggled, “I'm the ‘Don't’ Girl.”8 She wore low-cut gowns in many of her movies but didn't see them as being in any way risqué. “They were lusty and bawdy,” she said by way of qualification, “but healthy rather than suggestive.”9 How did she square being a sex symbol with having such a strong religious sense? She didn't have a problem being a sex symbol, as long as she wasn't promiscuous. Her attitude was that if God made a woman beautiful, there was nothing wrong with advertising the fact. Pursued by sex pests, she either turned a blind eye to them or yawned at their adolescent antics. “Beauty is a curse,” became a familiar complaint.
She kept her figure without fads or fanaticism; her tips on beauty and skin care were equally unfussy. Conducting her career in an era before personal trainers and silicone implants, O'Hara expended little effort in this regard.
A pronounced sense of loneliness after being set adrift in a strange country was another matter. Because she didn't relish socializing, a stable home life became a priority. She didn't choose actors as husbands, so there was always a pecking order in her marriages: she would be the top money earner and the more visible presence. She would also be significantly busier than her spouse. Many marriages collapse under this imbalance, particularly when the woman is the dominant partner; hence the disaster with Will Price. When O'Hara finally did find happiness with aviator Charles Blair, she was nearing the end of her career. This probably helped the marriage prosper.
She always had the common sense to change direction when things weren't going her way. For instance, she reinvented herself in the 1960s, at a time when many of her colleagues were heading for the long grass. She believed she could be just as attractive at forty as other stars who were barely out of their teens. Many actresses felt “past it” at forty, due in part to the sexism rampant in movies then (and even now), but she refused to accept she didn't have something to offer modern audiences, and box-office receipts proved her right.
She retired at the beginning of the 1970s to forge a new identity as Blair's wife, but she was never going to be a stay-at-home one. And that didn't change when he died. She became the first female president of an airline—another in her long list of firsts.
The 1980s brought health scares and a hurricane, but she still refused to slow down. And then, just when we thought we'd seen the last of her onscreen, she emerged phoenix-like from the ashes to take charge of a family situation once again, playing a reconstructed Mary Kate Danaher (albeit a more waspish one) in Christopher Columbus's Only the Lonely.
At ninety she could have passed for a woman in her seventies or even younger. All that sword fighting with Errol Flynn and company obviously stood her in good stead. Maybe those fencing sessions were her aerobics. The next generation of actresses, who used stunt doubles for insurance reasons, would have to go to the local gym for the same advantage.
O'Hara's life would have made a great movie. Hers is the story of an era, of a flame-haired siren who jousted with the best and maintained her perch at or near the top of the Hollywood tree, despite being shunted into a raft of movies of dubious merit: that's a special talent in itself. In her movies, even in the duds, she always gave her all. Nobody ever accused Maureen O'Hara of not caring.
When she wasn't allowed to act, she sang, and when she wasn't allowed to sing, she fought. John Wayne called her “the greatest guy I ever met” and meant it as a compliment. She outlived Wayne, John Ford, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and all the rest, finally retiring to the green fields of Erin like a salmon swimming upriver to die in the stream where it was spawned. She was “Queen” Maureen there—a legend, but an accessible one—and she grew old gracefully, never becoming the cane-thumping harridan she had once threatened.
She made her final career bow at the end of the last millennium because it seemed like the right time to take stock. Then she put her life down on paper in a well-received autobiography, letting the world know what life had really been like for the pale-skinned beauty from Beechwood Avenue who took her first public steps on the Abbey stage and went on to become Ireland's prime export to Hollywood.
If we look at the mosaic of her life as it's been presented to us, it all seems obvious. But was there another Maureen O'Hara behind the scenes? Was there someone whose inner thoughts belied the bromides she delivered so commodiously to the hordes of reporters who beat a path to her door? Was she a victim or a survivor of the men who used and abused her and of an industry that saw her as little more than a dollar sign in sequins? What was she really like as a person?
Being Ireland's first Hollywood superstar, she paved the way for a future generation of actresses seeking their own voice. She put the country on the movie map and was an ambassador for the Celtic Tiger long before that term was coined. She was something of a tiger herself, albeit one that purred as much as it roared. O'Hara was chilled champagne mixed with fire—a rare mélange. She ruled land and sea with a fierce passion in cinema's golden age, pitting herself against any protagonist in all manner of adventure sagas, a dishabillé love goddess with a huge sense of self and a debatable amount of estrogen, spitting out bile and devotion in almost equal measure. There was always a great thump of indignation in her; in certain moods, she became almost like a force of nature itself.
In the celluloid firmament there have been many shooting stars, but O'Hara has endured as an iconic figure. “There isn't a mortal man,” wrote Gladys Hall, “who wouldn't rip the moon out of a stormy sky for Maureen. There isn't a woman who wouldn't step aside for her if she knew what was good for her.”10 With her mahogany hair, her hoydenish ways, and her whip-smart delivery of lines, she created a character prototype that seemed to define her country of origin as much as Ireland defined her.