Background

Born Maureen FitzSimmons in Ranelagh, a suburb of Dublin, on August 17, 1920; one of six children of Charles Stewart Parnell FitzSimmons, one of the owners of the Shamrock Rovers football club, and opera singer Marguerita Lilburn. O'Hara's siblings were Peggy, the oldest, and younger Charles, Florrie, Margot, and Jimmy.

O'Hara earned the nickname "Baby Elephant" for being a pudgy infant. A tomboy, she enjoyed fishing in the River Dodder, riding horses, swimming and Gaelic football, and would play boys' games and climb trees.

Education

O'Hara attended the John Street West Girls' School near Thomas Street in Dublin's Liberties Area. She began dancing at the age of 5. When she recited a poem on stage in school at the age of six, O'Hara immediately felt an attraction to performing in front of an audience. From that age she trained in drama, music and dance along with her siblings at the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution in Dublin.

At the age of 10, O'Hara joined the Rathmines Theatre Company and began working in amateur theatre in the evenings after her lessons. One of her earliest roles was Robin Hood in a Christmas pantomime. O'Hara's dream at this time was to be a stage actress.

At the age of 14, O'Hara joined the Abbey Theatre. Though she was mentored by playwright Lennox Robinson, she found her time at the theatre disappointing.

In 1934, at the age of 15, she won the first Dramatic Prize of the national competition of the performing arts, the Dublin Feis Award, for her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. She trained as a shorthand typist, working for Crumlin Laundry before joining Eveready Battery Company, where she worked as a typist and bookkeeper. She later put her skills to use when she typed the script of The Quiet Man for John Ford.

In 1936, she became the youngest pupil to graduate from the Guildhall School of Music at the time, and the following year she won the Dawn Beauty Competition, winning £50.

Career

At age 18, Maureen O'Hara traveled to London for bit parts in two films, Kicking the Moon Around and My Irish Molly (both 1938). While in London, she was offered a screen test, which came to the attention of acclaimed actor-producer-director Charles Laughton, who was casting for roles in Jamaica Inn (1939), a new period drama he was making with Alfred Hitchcock. Laughton became convinced of O'Hara's screen presence after watching her test, and offered her a seven-year contract with his production company, Mayflower Pictures. He also suggested she change her surname to the more marquee-friendly O'Hara. Their first collaboration would be Jamaica Inn, an adaptation of the Daphne du Marier's story of a young orphan (O'Hara) who discovers that her uncle is the leader of a gang of pirates. Its success led to The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), with Laughton as Quasimodo and O'Hara as Esmeralda. Her performance would soon establish her screen persona as a fiercely independent woman who could hold her own with any man.

Her career hit a slight lull in 1940 when Laughton sold her contract to RKO due to the outbreak of World War II, which made filming in London impossible. But in 1941, director John Ford gave her career a boost by casting her as Angharad, the strong-willed female lead in his stirring family drama How Green Was My Valley. The film was such a hit and O'Hara such an integral part of its success that her stardom – mainly as a WWII pin-up – happened overnight.

For the next two decades, O'Hara was an exceptionally popular leading lady in a wide variety of features. She seemed equally at home in mainstream dramas like This Land Is Mine, as the love object and motivation for meek schoolteacher Charles Laughton to go to war, as she did in comedies like the seasonal favorite Miracle on 34th Street (1947), as the Macy's employee who hires Edmund Gwenn's Santa Claus, or Sitting Pretty (1948), which marked the first screen appearance of Clifton Webb as the acerbic Mr. Belvedere. But O'Hara was also well-equipped for period pieces like The Black Swan (1942), Sinbad the Sailor (1947), and At Sword's Point, (1952) in which she was romanced by swashbucklers Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks and Cornel Wilde.

In 1957 O'Hara starred in The Wings of Eagles. She demonstrated her ability to hold her own on-screen with appearances as Lady Godiva in Lady Godiva of Coventry in 1955 and as the title character in a television remake of Mrs. Miniver. O’Hara also played the mother of Hayley Mills’s romantically meddlesome twins in The Parent Trap. In 1963 she reunited with Wayne in McLintock!, in which she played the estranged wife of his character. She paired with Wayne a final time in the 1971 kidnapping drama Big Jake. In 1973, after making the TV movie The Red Pony O'Hara retired from films. She not only made trips around the world with her pilot husband, but owned and published a magazine, The Virgin Islander, writing a monthly column called Maureen O'Hara Says.

After the death of her husband Maureen O'Hara was elected President and CEO of Antilles Airboats, which brought her the distinction of being the first woman president of a scheduled airline in the United States. She made occasional returns to acting, notably in the comedy Only the Lonely (1991) and in the television movie The Last Dance (2000). She also wrote an autobiography 'Tis Herself in 2004.

Achievements

• 

  Maureen O’Hara was a renowned American actress and singer of Irish descent. Over the years, she starred in more than 60 films and gained a lot of popularity throughout the world.
  
  O'Hara was honored on This Is Your Life, which was aired on 27 March 1957. In 1982 she was the first person to receive the American Ireland Fund Lifetime Achievement Award in Los Angeles. She further received the Heritage Award from the Ireland-American Fund in 1991.
  
  In 1985 she was awarded the Career Achievement Award from the American Cinema Foundation. O'Hara also became the first woman to win the John F. Kennedy Memorial Award for "Outstanding American of Irish Descent for Service to God and Country". 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 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. 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 2011, O'Hara was formally inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame at an event in New Ross, County Wexford.
  
  In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected O'Hara to receive the Academy's Honorary Oscar, which was presented at the annual Governor's Awards in November of that year. O'Hara became 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.

Works

More photos

• album

  • The Best Of 2012

• book

  • 'Tis Herself: An Autobiography

    (A first-ever, revealing and candid look at the life and c...)

    2004

• movie

  • The Redhead From Wyoming

    (In Wyoming, Sweetwater town sheriff Stan Blaine finds him...)

    1953
  • The Spanish Main

    (When Dutch pirate ship captain Laurent Van Horn (Paul Hen...)

    1945
  • The Parent Trap

    (Two identical twin sisters, separated at birth by their p...)

    1961
  • The Last Dance

    (When a retired high-school teacher (Maureen O'Hara) falls...)

    2000
  • How Green Was My Valley

    (The Morgan family, settled in a Welsh mining village, rai...)

    1941
  • This Land Is Mine

    (A soft-spoken school teacher, in a Nazi occupied town, is...)

    1943
  • Big Jake

    (The avenging head of the McCandle clan returns to his est...)

    1971
  • Deadly Companions

    (To make amends for killing a man, a Civil War veteran acc...)

    1961
  • The Rare Breed

    (During the 1880s, Martha Price (Maureen O'Hara), a widowe...)

    1966
  • Spencer's Mountain

    (Clay Spencer plans to build a beautiful house for his wif...)

    1963
  • Against All Flags

    (Hawke is ordered by the Royal Navy to infiltrate a pirate...)

    1952
  • The Wings of Eagles

    (The story of a navy man who becomes a successful screenwr...)

    1957
  • Cab To Canada

    (Katherine Eure is a wealthy and very proper `little old l...)

    1998
  • Rio Grande

    (A cavalry unit located on the Mexican border must control...)

    1950
  • The Long Gray Line

    (An Irish immigrant becomes one of West Point's most belov...)

    1955
  • McLintock!

    (G W, a cattle baron, has been waiting for his daughter to...)

    1963
  • Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation

    (Hobbs plans a peaceful vacation with his wife and family....)

    1962

Religion

Maureen was a devout Catholic. She said once: "I have never lost my faith in God."

Views

Maureen O'Hara always called herself the "tough Irish lass" who would never compromise with her respect and reputation to land the roles she deserved through merit. Throughout her career in the film arena, she always stood up against injustice and improper treatment against women actors and for this, she gained a lot of followers. Her autobiography, 'Tis Herself', published in 2004, gave a candid and truthful account of her entire life experiences including her struggles while climbing the ladder to success.

Quotations: "God has a most wicked sense of humor."

"My heritage has been my grounding, and it has brought me peace."

"I was born into the most remarkable and eccentric family I could possibly have hoped for."

"I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter."

"Making movies is just like betting on horses at the racetrack."

"There's a terrible truth for many women in the picture business: Aging typically takes its toll and means fewer and less desirable roles."

"The Queen Mary was the most civilized and luxurious way one could travel to America in the late 1930s."

"I watch and listen to movies today and am shocked by the way actors deliver their lines. Everybody mumbles now and I don't understand why."

Membership

Maureen O'Hara was the president of the Universal Film & Festival Organization (UFFO), which promotes a code of conduct for film festivals and the film industry.

Personality

Maureen O'Hara was a woman in a man’s world, inclined to thrust her hands on her hips, speak her mind, and be told, "You’re pretty when you’re angry." She was an adventurous woman who was not frightened of carrying out her own stunts.

Teetotal and a non-smoker, O'Hara rejected the Hollywood party lifestyle, and was relatively moderate in her personal grooming. In her earlier career she refused to appear to smoke and drink on screen, and it was only later that she relented to avoid being out of a job. O'Hara was considered to be prudish in Hollywood. Malone wrote that "her attitude towards sex bordered on puritanical at times, which wasn't what one expected from a sex symbol". When asked why she would not pose for scantily clad photographs O'Hara remarked: "I come from a very strict family, and I can't do some of the things other actresses can because my folks in Dublin would think I turned out bad", and in 1948 she stated that she wouldn't be photographed in a bathing suit "Because I don't think I looked like Lana Turner in a bathing suit, frankly." O'Hara later commented that "I'm not prudish but my training was strict". She believed that her squeaky-clean lifestyle took its toll on her career. She once said, "I'm a helpless victim of a Hollywood whispering campaign. Because I don't let the producer and director kiss me every morning or let them paw me they have spread around town that I am not a woman, that I am a cold piece of marble statuary" and "I wouldn't throw myself on the casting couch, and I know that cost me parts. I wasn't going to play the whore. That wasn't me".

She vented her frustration on not being given edgier roles in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, saying "Producers look at a pretty face and think: 'She must have got this far on her looks'. Then comes along a girl with a plain face and they think, 'She must be a great actress, she isn't pretty'. So they give her the glamour treatment and the pretty girl gets left behind". O'Hara believed that she missed out on a number of roles in some of the classic black and white films because she aesthetically pictured so well in Technicolor productions.

Physical Characteristics: By the age of 12, O'Hara had reached the height of 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m), and it worried her mother for a while that she would become "the tallest girl" in Ireland as Maureen's father was 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m). She expressed relief when O'Hara only grew another two inches.

She was a green-eyed beauty with flaming red hair. Her natural beauty and glamorous appearance were much appreciated and she was popularly known as the 'Queen of Technicolor' in Hollywood. Such was her natural beauty that she was one of the few actresses in Hollywood during her career to not undergo cosmetic surgery, though she had one crooked tooth which she refused to part with.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  O'Hara was so keen on Gaelic football that at one point she pressed her father to found a women's team, and professed that Glenmalure Park, the home ground of the Rovers, became "like a second home". She enjoyed fighting, and trained in judo as a teenager.

Connections

While traveling aboard the Queen Mary to film "Hunchback," O'Hara met and was wooed by British director George Hanley Brown. The couple married aboard the ship, but the union was annulled just two years later.

O'Hara found time to marry her second husband, director Will Price, with whom she had a daughter, Bronwyn (who followed her mother into acting in the 1960s). Price's problems with alcohol lead to a divorce in 1952.

In 1968, O'Hara married famed aviator and Air Force Brigadier General Charles Blair. The happy union came to a tragic end in 1978 when Blair was killed in a plane crash.

Father:

Charles Stewart Parnell FitzSimons

Mother:

Marguerita Lilburn FitzSimons

ex-spouse:

Will Price

(October 27, 1913 - July 4, 1962, McComb, Mississippi, United States)

Brother:

Charles B. Fitzsimons

(May 8, 1924, Ranelagh, County Dublin, Ireland - February 14, 2001, Los Angeles, California, United States)

Charles B. Fitzsimons was an Irish actor who emigrated to the United States, where he became a film producer after ending his acting career. He was a younger brother of Maureen. His name was sometimes spelled as FitzSimons.

Brother:

James O'Hara

(September 11, 1927, Dublin, Republic of Ireland - December 3, 1992, Glendale, California, United States)

Sister:

Margot Fitzsimons

(March 2, 1926, Ranelagh, County Dublin, Ireland - April 10, 2014, Wilmington, North Carolina, United States)

Sister:

Clare Hamilton

Sister:

Peggy FitzSimons

(May 9, 1919, Ireland - March 9, 2013, California, United States)

ex-spouse:

George H. Brown

(July 24, 1913, London, United Kingdom - January 3, 2001, New York City, New York, United States)

late spouse:

Charles F. Blair Jr.

(July 19, 1909 – September 2, 1978)

Charles F. Blair Jr. was the United States Air Force Brigadier General, United States Navy aviator Captain, a test pilot, an airline pilot, and airline owner. He died in a Grumman Goose seaplane crash in the Caribbean.

Daughter:

Bronwyn FitzSimons

(June 30, 1944, Los Angeles, California, United States - May 2016, Glengarriff, Ireland)

Collegue :

James Stewart

(May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997)

James Stewart was an American actor and military officer who is among the most honored and popular stars in film history. A major Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player, Stewart was known for his distinctive drawl and down-to-earth persona, which helped him often portray American middle-class men struggling in crisis. Many of the films in which he starred have become enduring classics.

Friend:

Anna Lee

(2 January 1913 – 14 May 2004)

Anna Lee was a British-born American actress.

References

• Maureen O'Hara: The Biography
  2013
• Maureen O'Hara Movie Poster Book
  2017
• Maureen O'Hara
  1996