Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O'Hara (born Maureen FitzSimons; 17 August 1920 – 24 October 2015) was an Irish-American film actress and singer.

Spouses

• George H. Brown (m. 1939;ann. 1941)
• Will Price (m. 1941; div. 1953)
• Charles F. Blair, Jr. (m. 1968;wid. 1978)

The famously red-headed O'Hara was known for playing fiercely passionate but sensible heroines, and often worked with director John Ford and longtime friend John Wayne. She was one of the last living actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

O'Hara was first educated at the John Street West Girls' School near Thomas Street in Dublin's Liberties Area. From the ages of 6 to 17 she trained in drama, music and dance, and at the age of 10 joined the Rathmines Theatre Company and worked in amateur theatre in the evenings, after her lessons. Although O'Hara was never nominated for a competitive Academy Award, in November 2014 she was presented with an Honorary Academy Award with the inscription "To Maureen O'Hara, one of Hollywood's brightest stars, whose inspiring performances glowed with passion, warmth and strength". After Myrna Loy, O'Hara was only the second actress to receive an Academy Award for acting without having been nominated previously. Her autobiography, 'Tis Herself, was published in 2004 and was a New York Times Bestseller.

Early life and career

O'Hara was born as Maureen FitzSimons on Beechwood Avenue in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh and attended school in Milltown, Dublin. She was the second oldest of the six children of Charles Stewart Parnell FitzSimons and Marguerita (nėe Lilburn) FitzSimons. Her father was in the clothing business and also bought into Shamrock Rovers Football Club, a team O'Hara supported from childhood. Her mother, a former operatic contralto, was a successful women's clothier. Her siblings were Peggy, the oldest, and younger Charles, Florrie, Margot and Jimmy. Peggy dedicated her life to a religious order, the Irish Sisters of Charity and taught at an elementary school in Long Beach, California, and the younger children all went on to receive training at the Abbey Theatre and the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution in Dublin. O'Hara's dream at this time was to be a stage actress. She was first educated at the John Street West Girls' School near Thomas Street in Dublin's Liberties area.

O'Hara's father was a very practical man and did not entirely support her theatrical aspirations. He insisted that she learn a skill so that she would have something to fall back on to earn a living with in case her experience in the performing arts was not successful. She enrolled in a business school and became a proficient bookkeeper and typist. Those skills proved helpful many years later when she was able to take and transcribe production notes dictated by John Ford for the screen adaptation of Maurice Walsh's short story The Quiet Man.

She did well in her Abbey training and was given an opportunity for a screen test in London. The studio adorned her in a "gold lamé dress with flapping sleeves like wings" and heavy makeup with an ornate hair style. Reportedly, her thoughts concerning the incident were, "If this is the movies, I want nothing to do with them!" The screen test was deemed to be far from satisfactory; however, actor Charles Laughton later saw the test and, despite the overdone makeup and costume, was intrigued, paying particular notice to her large and expressive eyes.

Laughton subsequently asked his business partner Erich Pommer to see the film clip. Pommer agreed with Laughton and O'Hara was offered an initial seven-year contract with their new company, Mayflower Pictures. Her first major film wasJamaica Inn (1939) directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Laughton was so pleased with O'Hara's performance that she was cast in the role of Esmeralda opposite him in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), which was to be filmed by RKO in Hollywood.

After the completion of Hunchback, World War II began, and Laughton, realising his company could no longer film in London, sold O'Hara's contract to RKO. That studio cast her in low-budget films until she was rescued by director John Ford, who cast her as Angharad in How Green Was My Valley (1941), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Later in the decade, she starred as Doris Walker and the mother of a young Natalie Wood in 20th Century Fox's Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which has become a perennial Christmas classic, with a traditional network television airing every Thanksgiving Day on NBC. The film also helped to further establish O'Hara's career after the film garnered several awards, including an Academy Award Nomination for Best Picture.

In 1946, she became a naturalised citizen of the United States and held dual citizenship with the US and her native Ireland. An icon of Hollywood's Golden Age, at the height of her career O'Hara was considered one of the world's most beautiful women. She is often remembered for her onscreen chemistry with John Wayne. They made five films together between 1948 and 1972: Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Wings of Eagles, McLintock! and Big Jake.

In addition to her acting skills, O'Hara had a soprano voice and described singing as her first love. She was able to channel her love of singing through television. In the late '50s and early '60s, she was a guest on musical variety shows with Perry Como, Andy Williams, Betty Grable and Tennessee Ernie Ford. In 1960, she starred on Broadway in the musical Christine which ran for 12 performances. That year she released two successful recordings, Love Letters from Maureen O'Hara and Maureen O'Hara Sings her Favorite Irish Songs.

Marriage, retirement and comeback

In 1939, at the age of 19, O'Hara secretly married Englishman George H. Brown, a film producer, production assistant and occasional scriptwriter whose best known work is the first of Margaret Rutherford's Miss Marple mysteries, Murder, She Said (1961). The marriage was annulled in 1941. Later that year, O'Hara married American film director William Houston Price (dialogue director in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), but the union ended in 1953, reportedly as a result of his alcohol abuse. They had one child in 1944, a daughter named Bronwyn FitzSimons Price. Bronwyn has one son, Conor Beau FitzSimons, who was born on 8 September 1970. From 1953 until 1967 O'Hara had a relationship with Enrique Parra (1 February 1926 – 4 June 2015), a Mexican politician and banker. She wrote in her autobiography; "Enrique saved me from the darkness of an abusive marriage and brought me back into the warm light of life again. Leaving him was one of the most painful things I have ever had to do."

She married her third husband, Charles F. Blair, Jr., on 12 March 1968. Blair was a pioneer of transatlantic aviation, a former brigadier general of the US Air Force, a former chief pilot at Pan Am, and founder and head of the U.S. Virgin Islands airline Antilles Air Boats. A few years after her marriage to Blair, O'Hara for the most part retired from acting (in the special features section to the DVD release of The Quiet Man, a story is recounted that O'Hara retired after longtime collaborators John Wayne and John Ford teased her about being married but not being a good, stay-at-home housewife). Blair died in 1978 while flying a Grumman Goose for his airline from St. Croix to St. Thomas, crashing after an engine failure. O'Hara was elected CEO and president of the airline, with the added distinction of becoming the first woman president of a scheduled airline in the U.S.

O'Hara remained retired from acting until 1991, when she starred in the film Only the Lonely, playing Rose Muldoon, the domineering mother of a Chicago cop played by John Candy. In the following years, she continued to work, starring in several made-for-TV films, including The Christmas Box, Cab for Canada and The Last Dance, the latter her last film, released in 2000.

She had homes in Arizona and the Virgin Islands, but lived mainly in Glengarriff, County Cork, after suffering a stroke in 2005. In June 2011, she participated at the Maureen O'Hara Film Festival in Glengarriff.

In May 2012, O'Hara's family contacted social workers regarding claims that O'Hara, who had short-term memory loss, was a victim ofelder abuse. In September 2012, O'Hara flew to the US after receiving doctor's permission to fly. She lived with her grandson, Conor Beau FitzSimons, in Idaho.

On 24–25 May 2013, O'Hara made a public appearance at the 2013 John Wayne Birthday "Tribute to Maureen O'Hara" celebration inWinterset, Iowa. The occasion was the ground breaking for the new John Wayne Birthplace Museum; the festivities included an official proclamation from Iowa Governor Terry Branstad declaring 25 May 2013, as "Maureen O'Hara Day" in Iowa. The appearance included a performance by the Shannon Rovers Irish Pipe Band, who travelled from Chicago for the event. About Wayne, O'Hara said; "I was tough. I was tall. I was strong. I didn't take any nonsense from anybody. He was tough, he was tall, he was strong and he didn't take any nonsense from anybody. As a man and a human being, I adored him."

On 24 October 2015, O'Hara died in her sleep at her home in Idaho.

Achievements and activities

O'Hara received the Heritage Award by the Ireland-American Fund in 1991. For her contributions to the motion picture industry, O'Hara has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7004 Hollywood Blvd. In 1993, she was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She was also awarded the Golden Boot Award.

In March 1999, O'Hara was selected to be Grand Marshal of New York City's St. Patrick's Day Parade. In 2004, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Film and Television Academy in her native Dublin. The same year, O'Hara released her autobiography ‍ '​Tis Herself, co-authored with Johnny Nicoletti and published by Simon & Schuster. She wrote the foreword for the cookbook At Home in Ireland, and in 2007, she wrote the foreword for the biography of her friend and film co-star, the late actress Anna Lee.

O'Hara was named Irish America‍ '​s "Irish American of the Year" in 2005, with festivities held at the Plaza Hotel in New York. In 2006, O'Hara attended the Grand Reopening and Expansion of the Flying Boats Museum in Foynes, County Limerick as a patron of the museum. A significant portion of the museum is dedicated to her late husband Charles. O'Hara donated her late husband's seaplane, the Excambian (a Sikorsky VS-44A), to the New England Air Museum. The restoration of the plane took eight years and time was donated by former pilots and mechanics in honor of Charles Blair. It is the only surviving example of this type of early trans-Atlantic plane.

In 2011, O'Hara was formally inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame at an event in New Ross, County Wexford.[22] She was also named president of the Universal Film & Festival Organization (UFFO) which promotes a code of conduct for film festivals and the film industry.

In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected O'Hara to receive the Academy's Honorary Oscar, to be presented at the annual Governor's Awards in November. O'Hara becomes only the second actress, after Myrna Loy in 1991, to receive an Honorary Oscar without having previously been nominated for an Oscar in a competitive category.