Maureen O’Hara, actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age, dies at 95

She was in such classics as “The Quiet Man”…

O’Hara was one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies of the 1940s and 1950s and was a favorite of fabled director John Ford. In The Quiet Man, which O’Hara considered her favorite film, she exuded an air of staunch defiance, refusing to consummate her marriage to Wayne until he fights for their dowry.

During her movie heyday, she was known as the “Queen of Technicolor” because of the camera’s love affair with her vivid red hair and pale complexion. (1963, with Wayne giving her a spanking), Spencer’s Mountain (same year, with Henry Fonda) and The Rare Breed (1966, with James Stewart). She was 95 years old.

In addition to her acting skills, O’Hara had a soprano voice and described singing as her first love. A few of her finest films and most memorable were directed by John Ford, starting with “The Quiet Man”, in which she played opposite John Wayne.

“It’s a bold one you are, and who gave you leave to be kissing me?” she says.

The screen legend, born near Dublin in 1920 as Maureen Fitzsimons, married three times. Co-star Laughton was so impressed that he took her to the United States and cast her in a major role in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame“.

But she also had talent.

“I do like to get my own way”, O’Hara said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1991. “That wasn’t me”, she told the Telegraph in 2014. John Wayne plays the hero, Sean Thornton, a retired boxer who returns to his family’s ancestral home. They were all fine actors, gentlemen, intelligent, considerate – fine people. I was tall. I was strong.

In 1947 she made “Miracle on 34th Street” starring as Natalie Wood’s mother who pooh-poohs her daughter’s belief in Santa Claus; while it’s probably her most well-known film, the pic is something of an odd duck in her career as her character quickly transforms from hard-headed and skeptical to warmly sentimental.

They don’t make movies like that any more. In 2004, a journalist inquired as to how she retained her beauty over all these years and she replied, by saying, “I was Irish”. She played the mother of twins, both played by Hayley Mills, who conspire to reunite their divorced parents in the 1961 Disney comedy “The Parent Trap”.

Her family announced the passing in The Irish Times overnight with the following announcement.

She married her third husband, Charles F Blair, Jr, on March 12, 1968.