175 Facts About Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O'Hara was an Irish-born naturalized American actress and singer, who became successful in Hollywood from the 1940s through to the 1960s.

Maureen O'Hara was a natural redhead who was known for playing passionate but sensible heroines, often in Westerns and adventure films.

Maureen O'Hara worked with director John Ford and long-time friend John Wayne on numerous projects.

Maureen O'Hara aspired to become an actress from a very young age.

Maureen O'Hara trained with the Rathmines Theatre Company from the age of 10 and at the Abbey Theatre from the age of 14.

Maureen O'Hara was given a screen test, which was deemed unsatisfactory, but Charles Laughton saw potential in her, and arranged for her to co-star with him in Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn in 1939.

Maureen O'Hara moved to Hollywood the same year to appear with him in the production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and was given a contract by RKO Pictures.

Maureen O'Hara appeared in films such as How Green Was My Valley, The Black Swan with Tyrone Power, The Spanish Main, Sinbad the Sailor, the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street with John Payne and Natalie Wood, and Comanche Territory.

Maureen O'Hara retired from the industry in 1971, but returned 20 years later to appear with John Candy in Only the Lonely.

Maureen O'Hara was married three times, and had one daughter, Bronwyn, with her second husband.

Maureen O'Hara stated that she was "born into the most remarkable and eccentric family I could have possibly hoped for".

Maureen O'Hara was the second-eldest of six children of Charles and Marguerite FitzSimons, and the only red-headed child in the family.

Maureen O'Hara's father was in the clothing business and bought into Shamrock Rovers Football Club, a team O'Hara supported from childhood.

Maureen O'Hara inherited her singing voice from her mother, a former operatic contralto and successful women's clothier, who in her younger years was widely considered to have been one of Ireland's most beautiful women.

Maureen O'Hara noted that whenever her mother left the house, men would leave their houses just so they could catch a glimpse of her in the street.

Maureen O'Hara's siblings were Peggy, the eldest, and younger Charles, Florrie, Margot, and Jimmy.

Maureen O'Hara earned the nickname "Baby Elephant" for being a pudgy infant.

Maureen O'Hara was so keen on soccer that at one point, she pressed her father to found a women's team, and professed that Glenmalure Park, the home ground of Shamrock Rovers FC, became "like a second home".

Maureen O'Hara enjoyed fighting, and trained in judo as a teenager.

Maureen O'Hara later admitted that she was jealous of boys in her youth and the freedom they had, and that they could steal apples from orchards and not get into trouble.

Maureen O'Hara first attended the John Street West Girls' School near Thomas Street in Dublin's Liberties Area.

Maureen O'Hara began dancing at the age of 5, when a fortune teller predicted that she would become rich and famous, and she would boast to friends as they sat in her back garden that she would "become the most famous actress in the world".

When she recited a poem on stage in school at the age of six, Maureen O'Hara immediately felt an attraction to performing in front of an audience.

At the age of 10, Maureen O'Hara joined the Rathmines Theatre Company and began working in amateur theatre in the evenings after her lessons.

Maureen O'Hara expressed relief when O'Hara only grew another two inches.

Maureen O'Hara trained as a shorthand typist, working for Crumlin Laundry before joining Eveready Battery Company, where she worked as a typist and bookkeeper.

Maureen O'Hara later put her skills to use when she typed the script of The Quiet Man for John Ford.

At the age of 17, Maureen O'Hara was offered her first major role at the Abbey Theatre, but was distracted by the attentions of actor-singer Harry Richman.

Maureen O'Hara proposed that she go to Elstree Studios for a screen test and become a film actress.

Maureen O'Hara detested the audition, during which she had to walk in and pick up a telephone.

Maureen O'Hara recalled thinking to herself, "My God, get me back to the Abbey".

Maureen O'Hara later stated that "I owe my whole career to Mr Pommer".

Maureen O'Hara made her screen debut in Walter Forde's Kicking the Moon Around, although she did not consider it a part of her filmography.

Maureen O'Hara wears no makeup, and there's no Hollywood glamour, but despite that, she is rapturously beautiful.

Maureen O'Hara's accent is thick, which is perhaps why she didn't mention the film much.

Maureen O'Hara portrayed the innkeeper's niece, an orphan who goes to live with her aunt and uncle at a Cornish tavern, a heroine which she describes as "torn between the love of her family and her love for a lawman in disguise".

Maureen O'Hara boarded the RMS Queen Mary with he and her mother to New York, and then traveled by train to Hollywood.

Maureen O'Hara portrayed Esmeralda, a gypsy dancer who is imprisoned and later sentenced to death by the Parisian authorities.

Director William Dieterle initially showed concern that Maureen O'Hara was too tall and disliked her wavy hair, asking for her to step under a shower to straighten it out.

Maureen O'Hara was generally praised for her performance though some critics thought that Laughton stole the show.

Maureen O'Hara later professed that this "broke my heart, I felt completely abandoned in a strange and faraway place".

Maureen O'Hara next featured in John Farrow's A Bill of Divorcement, a remake of George Cukor's 1932 film.

Maureen O'Hara portrayed Sydney Fairchild, who was played by Katharine Hepburn in the original, in a film which she considered to have had a "screenplay [which] was mediocre at best".

Maureen O'Hara punched him in the jaw one day, which put an end to the mistreatment.

Maureen O'Hara's performance was criticized by reviewers, with the critic from The New York Sun writing that she "lacked the intensity and desperation it must have; nor does she seem to have a sparkle of humor".

Maureen O'Hara next found a role as an aspiring ballerina who performs with a dance troupe in Dance, Girl, Dance.

Maureen O'Hara considered it to have been a physically demanding film, and felt intimidated by Lucille Ball during the production as she had been a former Ziegfeld and Goldwyn girl and was a superior dancer.

Maureen O'Hara began 1941 by appearing in They Met in Argentina, RKO's answer to Down Argentine Way.

Maureen O'Hara later declared that she "knew it was going to be a stinker; terrible script, bad director, preposterous plot, forgettable music".

Maureen O'Hara grew increasingly frustrated with the direction of her career at this time.

Ida Zeitlin wrote that Maureen O'Hara had "reached a pitch of despair where she was about ready to throw in the towel, to break her contract, to collapse against the stone wall of indifference and howl like a baby wolf".

Maureen O'Hara pleaded with her agent for a role, however small, in John Ford's upcoming film How Green Was My Valley, at 20th Century Fox, a film about a close, hard-working Welsh mining family living in the heart of the South Wales Valleys in the 19th century.

Ford developed a nickname for her, "Rosebud", and the two developed a long but turbulent friendship, with Maureen O'Hara often visiting Ford and his wife Mary in social visits and spending time aboard his yacht Araner.

Maureen O'Hara recalled that Ford would allow her to improvise extensively during the filming, but was very much the boss, commenting that "nobody dared step out of line, which gave the performers a sense of security".

Maureen O'Hara became such good friends with Anna Lee during the shooting that she later named her daughter Bronwyn after Lee's character.

Malone notes that when the United States entered World War II in 1941, many of the better actors became involved in the war effort and Maureen O'Hara struggled to find good co-stars.

Maureen O'Hara had next intended appearing opposite Tyrone Power in Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake, but was hospitalized in early 1942, during which she had her appendix and two ovarian cysts removed at Reno Hospital.

Maureen O'Hara passed it off as "probably a fragment left over from an abortion", which deeply offended her, as a devout Catholic.

Maureen O'Hara instead starred in the Technicolor war picture, To the Shores of Tripoli, her first Technicolor picture and first on-screen partnership with John Payne, in which she portrayed Navy nurse Lieutenant Mary Carter.

Maureen O'Hara next played an unconventional role as a timid socialite who joins the army as a cook in Henry Hathaway's Ten Gentlemen from West Point, which tells the fictional story of the first class of the United States Military Academy in the early 19th century.

Later that year, Maureen O'Hara starred opposite Tyrone Power, George Sanders, Laird Cregar and Anthony Quinn in Henry King's swashbuckler The Black Swan.

Maureen O'Hara found it exhilarating working with Power, who was renowned for his "wicked sense of humor".

Maureen O'Hara grew very concerned about one scene in the picture in which she is thrown overboard in her underwear by Power, and sent a warning letter home to Ireland in advance.

Maureen O'Hara refused to take her wedding ring off in one scene which resulted in screen adjustments to make it look like a dinner ring.

Maureen O'Hara played the love interest of Henry Fonda in the 1943 war picture Immortal Sergeant.

Maureen O'Hara noted that Fonda was studying for his service entry exams at the time and had his head in books between takes, and that 20th Century Fox publicized one of the last love scenes between them in the film as Fonda's last screen kiss before entering the war.

Maureen O'Hara next portrayed a European school teacher opposite George Sanders and Charles Laughton, in their last film together, in Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine for RKO.

Maureen O'Hara considers This Land is Mine and The Fallen Sparrow to have been two important pictures in O'Hara's career, "adding to her growing prestige in the film industry", helping her "crawl out from the gimcrack melodrama of adventure films".

Maureen O'Hara was called the Queen of Technicolor, because when that film process first came into use, nothing seemed to show off its splendor better than her rich red hair, bright green eyes and flawless peaches-and-cream complexion.

Maureen O'Hara believed that the term negatively affected her career, as most people viewed her solely as a beauty who looked good on film, rather than as a talented actress.

In 1944 O'Hara was cast opposite Joel McCrea in William A Wellman's biographical western Buffalo Bill.

In 1945, Maureen O'Hara starred opposite Paul Henreid in The Spanish Main as feisty noblewoman Contessa Francesca, the daughter of a Mexican viceroy.

Maureen O'Hara described it as "one of my more decorative roles", as her character is a particularly aggressive one among the men on a ship, and during the course of the film her face is smothered in chimney soot.

Maureen O'Hara almost did not win the role when another actress falsely told RKO executive Joe Nolan that she was "as big as a horse" after giving birth to a daughter in 1944.

Maureen O'Hara informed her about the project that would become The Quiet Man.

In Gregory Ratoff's musical Do You Love Me, Maureen O'Hara portrayed a prim, bespectacled music school dean who transforms herself into a desirable, sophisticated lady in the big city.

Maureen O'Hara commented that it was "one of the worst pictures I ever made".

Maureen O'Hara was offered roles in The Razor's Edge, which went to Tierney, John Wayne's film Tycoon, which went to Laraine Day, and Bob Hope's The Paleface, which went to Jane Russell.

Maureen O'Hara turned down the role in The Paleface as she was going through a turbulent period in her personal life and "didn't think I would be able to laugh every day and have fun".

Maureen O'Hara plays a glamorous adventuress who assists Sinbad locate the hidden treasure of Alexander the Great.

TCM state that Maureen O'Hara had been "angling" to star in Forever Amber, Fox's big historical romance at the time, but believe that due to a contractual clause, neither of her joint contract owners, Fox and RKO, would accept her appearing in a "major star vehicle" at the time.

Maureen O'Hara reportedly belched in her face during dance sequences and accused her of anti-Semitism, being married to a Jewish woman at the time, which she vehemently denied.

In 1949, Maureen O'Hara played what she described as a "frustrated talent manager who shoots her star client in a jealous rage" opposite Melvyn Douglas in A Woman's Secret.

Maureen O'Hara only agreed to appear in the production to meet the one-picture-a-year contractual obligation to RKO.

Maureen O'Hara next had a role as a wealthy widow who falls in love with an alcoholic artist in the Victorian melodrama The Forbidden Street, which was shot at Shepperton Studios in London.

Maureen O'Hara felt that her performance was poor and admitted that she did not have her heart set on the film.

Maureen O'Hara noted that the film earned a tremendous amount of money for Universal, and its success led to Universal buying into her RKO contract.

Maureen O'Hara then appeared as Countess D'Arneau opposite John Payne in Tripoli, directed by Maureen O'Hara's second husband, William Houston Price.

Maureen O'Hara was next cast by John Ford in the Western Rio Grande, the final installment of his cavalry trilogy.

Maureen O'Hara declared that "from our very first scenes together, working with John Wayne was comfortable for me".

Maureen O'Hara "despised" the film and everything it stood for, but had no choice but to make the film or be suspended.

Maureen O'Hara disliked director Lewis Allen and producer Howard Hughes, whom she thought was "cold as ice".

In 1952, Maureen O'Hara starred opposite John Wayne again in Ford's romantic comedy drama, The Quiet Man.

Maureen O'Hara was disconcerted with Ford's harsh treatment of Wayne during the production and constant ribbing.

The film was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, though Maureen O'Hara was devastated at not even being nominated for an award.

Maureen O'Hara, knowing Flynn's reputation as a womanizer, was on close guard during the production.

Maureen O'Hara noted that "Jeff was a real sweetheart, but acting with him was like acting with a broomstick".

In 1954, Maureen O'Hara starred in Malaga, known as Fire over Africa, which was shot on location in Spain.

Maureen O'Hara played a Mata Hari-like character, a secret agent who attempts to find the ringleader of a smuggling ring in Tangiers.

In 1955, Maureen O'Hara made her fourth picture with Ford, The Long Gray Line, which she considered being "by far the most difficult" due to declining relations with John Ford.

John Wayne had originally intended co-starring, but due to a conflicting schedule Maureen O'Hara recommended Tyrone Power in replacement.

Maureen O'Hara would ask the crew if she was in a good mood, and if that was the case, he would say "then we're going to have a horrible day" and vice versa.

Maureen O'Hara would provoke her by telling her to "move her fat Irish ass".

Contrary to what Universal claimed to the press, Maureen O'Hara was not nude in the film, wearing a "full-length body leotard and underwear that was concealed by my long tresses".

In December 1955, Maureen O'Hara negotiated a new five-picture contract with Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn, with $85,000 per picture.

Maureen O'Hara thought the film was so bad that neither she nor her family saw it, though she enjoyed working with John Forsythe.

In 1957, Maureen O'Hara marked the end of her collaboration with John Ford with The Wings of Eagles, which was based on the true story of an old friend of Ford's, Frank "Spig" Wead, a naval aviator who became a screenwriter in Hollywood.

Maureen O'Hara knew every battle in Ireland and all of its history.

Maureen O'Hara had a soprano voice and described singing as her first love, which she was able to channel through television.

In 1960, Maureen O'Hara starred on Broadway in the musical Christine which ran for 12 performances.

Maureen O'Hara found her Broadway failure to be a "major disappointment" and returned to Hollywood.

Maureen O'Hara described Love Letters from Maureen O'Hara, a moderate success, as an act of revenge, given that Hollywood would not let her appear in a musical.

In 1959, Maureen O'Hara returned to film, starring as a secretary who is sent from London to Havana to assist a British secret agent in the commercially successful Our Man in Havana.

Maureen O'Hara beat Lauren Bacall to the role as she was busy with other engagements.

In 1961, Maureen O'Hara portrayed Kit Tilden in the western The Deadly Companions, Sam Peckinpah's feature-film debut.

Maureen O'Hara was involved in a legal dispute with Walt Disney, backed by the Screen Actors Guild, over billing for the film.

Maureen O'Hara played Peggy, the token wife of Hobbs, a character who is very family-oriented and talkative.

Maureen O'Hara united with Henry Fonda after 20 years to appear in Spencer's Mountain, roughly based on the novel by Earl Hamner Jr.

Maureen O'Hara played Olivia Spencer, the devout Christian wife of Fonda's atheist character, who during the course of the film sings a hymn at an outdoor funeral.

Maureen O'Hara performed many of her own stunts in the film, including one scene where she falls backwards off a ladder into a trough.

In late 1964, Maureen O'Hara went to Italy to shoot The Battle of the Villa Fiorita with Rossano Brazzi.

Maureen O'Hara played a British woman who leaves her diplomat husband in England for an Italian pianist.

Maureen O'Hara had high expectations for the film but soon realized that Brazzi was miscast.

Maureen O'Hara was so frustrated with the finished film, which was a box office flop, that she cried.

Maureen O'Hara made her last picture with James Stewart the following year in the comedic western, The Rare Breed.

Maureen O'Hara later required orthopedic surgery to correct the injury.

Maureen O'Hara played Rose Muldoon, the domineering Irish mother of a Chicago cop, who has an indifference to Sicilians.

Maureen O'Hara described Candy as "one of my all-time favorite leading men", and was surprised by the extent of his talent, remarking that he was a "comedic genius but an actor with an extraordinary dramatic talent" who very much reminded her of Charles Laughton.

Maureen O'Hara dismissed method acting as "tommyrot", believing that acting should be acting, and placed great emphasis on work ethic and punctuality.

John Ford reportedly once commented in a letter that Maureen O'Hara was the finest actress in Hollywood, but he rarely praised her in person.

Maureen O'Hara had a reputation in Hollywood for bossiness, and John Wayne once referred to her as "the greatest guy I ever met".

Maureen O'Hara was friends with Zanuck and Harry Cohn, the boss of Columbia Pictures, who was notorious for being the "nastiest man in Hollywood", Film executives respected the fact that she was bold and completely honest towards them.

Maureen O'Hara declared that she had "never had a temperamental fit in my life", but did admit to walking off the set in disgust at George Montgomery nearly choking her to death with a kiss during the filming of Ten Gentleman from West Point.

Teetotal and a non-smoker, Maureen O'Hara rejected the Hollywood party lifestyle, and was relatively moderate in her personal grooming.

Maureen O'Hara later commented that "I'm not prudish but my training was strict".

Maureen O'Hara believed that her fastidious lifestyle took its toll on her career.

Maureen O'Hara believed that she missed out on a number of roles in some of the classic black-and-white films, because her looks were shown to great advantage in Technicolor productions.

In 1939, at the age of 19, O'Hara secretly married Englishman George H Brown, a film producer, production assistant and occasional scriptwriter whom she had met on the set of Jamaica Inn.

Brown announced that he and Maureen O'Hara had kept the marriage a secret and that they would have a full marriage ceremony in October 1939, but Maureen O'Hara never returned.

Maureen O'Hara became a naturalised American citizen on 25 January 1946.

In December 1941, Maureen O'Hara married American film director William Houston Price, who was the dialogue director in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Maureen O'Hara lost her virginity to Price on her wedding night and immediately regretted it, recalling thinking to herself, "What the hell have I done now".

Maureen O'Hara always denied having any extramarital affairs, but in his autobiography, frequent collaborator Anthony Quinn claimed to have fallen in love with her on the set of Sinbad the Sailor.

Maureen O'Hara commented that she was "dazzling, and the most understanding woman on this earth" who "brought out the Gaelic in him", being half Irish.

From 1953 to 1967, Maureen O'Hara had a relationship with Enrique Parra, a wealthy Mexican politician and banker.

Maureen O'Hara met him at a restaurant during a trip to Mexico in 1951.

Maureen O'Hara moved in 1953 to a smaller property at 10677 Somma Way in Bel Air, amid frequent visits to Mexico City, where she and Parra were very well-known celebrities.

Maureen O'Hara hired a detective to follow Parra in Mexico and found that he was being fully honest about the relationship with his ex-wife and that she could trust him.

Price continued to harass Maureen O'Hara for dating Parra and filed a case against her on 20 June 1955, seeking custody of Bronwyn and accusing her of immorality.

Maureen O'Hara filed a countersuit, charging him with contempt of court for refusing to pay $50 a month in child support and a $7-a-month alimony.

Maureen O'Hara proved her innocence by presenting a passport showing that she was in Spain shooting Fire Over Africa at the time.

Maureen O'Hara claimed in her autobiography that she became the first actress to win a case against an industry tabloid when Confidential were apparently found guilty of libel and conspiring to publish obscenity, but Malone notes that the trial dragged on for six weeks and the case was actually eventually settled out of court in July 1958.

Maureen 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 United States.

In 1978, Maureen O'Hara was diagnosed with uterine cancer, which had to be removed with an operation.

Maureen O'Hara was greatly affected by John Wayne's cancer during this period, and Wayne reportedly wept on the phone when she informed him that her own cancer had been given the all clear.

Maureen O'Hara was instrumental in Wayne being given a special medal shortly before his death the following year.

Maureen O'Hara passed on the airline business the following year, which by this time was chartering 120 flights a day with a fleet of 27 planes.

Maureen O'Hara had had considerable prior experience with business as from the 1940s she ran a clothing store in Tarzana, Los Angeles, operating under her name, specializing in dresses for women.

Maureen O'Hara increasingly spent time in Glengarriff on the southwest coast of Ireland, and established a golf tournament there in 1984 in her husband's memory.

Maureen O'Hara moved permanently to Glengariff after suffering a stroke in 2005.

In May 2012, Maureen O'Hara's family contacted social workers regarding claims that Maureen O'Hara, who had short-term memory loss, was a victim of elder abuse.

In September 2012, Maureen O'Hara flew to the United States after receiving doctor's permission to fly, and moved in with her grandson in Idaho.

On 24 October 2015, Maureen O'Hara died in her sleep at her home in Boise, Idaho, from natural causes.

Maureen O'Hara's remains were buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia next to her late husband Charles Blair.

Maureen O'Hara was honored on This Is Your Life, which was aired on 27 March 1957.

Maureen O'Hara further received the Heritage Award from the Ireland-American Fund in 1991.

In March 1999, Maureen O'Hara was selected to be Grand Marshal of New York City's St Patrick's Day Parade.

Maureen O'Hara wrote the foreword for the cookbook At Home in Ireland, and in 2007 she penned the foreword to the biography of her friend and film co-star, the late actress Anna Lee.

Maureen O'Hara was named Irish Americas "Irish American of the Year" in 2005, with festivities held at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

In 2006, Maureen O'Hara attended the Grand Reopening and Expansion of the Flying Boats Museum in Foynes, County Limerick as a patron of the museum.

Maureen O'Hara donated her late husband's seaplane, the Excambian, to the New England Air Museum.

In 2011, Maureen O'Hara was formally inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame at an event in New Ross, County Wexford.

In 2012, Maureen O'Hara received the Freedom of the Town of Kells, County Meath, Ireland, her father's home, and a sculpture in her honour was unveiled.

In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected Maureen O'Hara to receive the academy's Honorary Oscar, which was presented at the annual Governor's Awards in November that year.

Maureen O'Hara became 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.