Movie legend Maureen O’Hara dead

She channelled that through TV rather than films.

“Being married to Charlie Blair and traveling all over the world with him, believe me, was enough for any woman”, she said in a 1995 Associated Press interview. “Thankful for the light you shared”, she said on Twitter. After his death in a 1978 plane crash, she ran the company for several years before selling it, making her the first woman president of a scheduled airline in the United States. In one scene, Wayne dragged her through a field that he and director John Ford had covered in sheep dung as a prank.

A Dubliner by birth who spent many years in Co Cork, O’Hara’s roots have been celebrated in the last 24 hours.

Her third husband was aviator Charles Blair, whom she Wednesday in 1968.

Set in woodland overlooking Glengarriff Bay, the house had a private island and beach. A message from her family read, “As much as Maureen cherished her privacy, she always appreciated the expressions of good will from people around the world and from all walks of life”. “She was a great ambassador for Glengarriff”. Through her father, she learned to love sports; through her mother, she and her five siblings were exposed to the theater.

Maureen once said she had even harboured ambitions to play for Rovers, and couldn’t understand why they didn’t have a ladies’ team.

Back on screen, her most successful partnership was with John Wayne. She appeared in five of his films, forging a strong bond of mutual admiration and respect.

Maureen O’Hara. Photo: Getty Images. “She is a great guy”.

However, her own career did not pass without scandal. In 1957, a gossip magazine called “Confidential” reported that she was spotted indulging in a steamy “necking session” with a mystery South American man in the back row of a Hollywood cinema. She was given the Heritage Award by the Ireland-American Fund in 1991.

O’Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons in August 1920 in Dublin, and moved to Hollywood in 1939 and later became a U.S. citizen.

When she was 14 she enrolled at the Abbey’s theatre school and within a year was playing Shakespearean roles. When word reached London, she was offered a screen test, and a friend convinced her reluctant parents to allow it. But she scored her first big role (and a surname) change with Jamaica Inn, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Maureen’s manager added: ‘At 95, she used to say that she had the wear and tear that came with that kind of mileage.