With her red hair and green eyes, she was once dubbed the “Queen of Technicolor”.
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O’Hara most often played strong and willful women.
Even the creators of the process claimed her as its best advertisement.
She starred in more than 50 films and thrived in various genres: dramas, swashbuckling adventures, Westerns, comedies and family films. Her favorite was 1952’s “The Quiet Man”, filmed in Ireland.
‘Her characters were feisty and fearless, just as she was in real life.
Back on screen, her most successful partnership was with John Wayne.
“She was fiery and amusing, and she loved cracking a joke”, he said. “She is a great guy”.
Born on August 17, 1920 Maureen O’Hara was an Irish-American actress and singer in Ranelagh, County Dublin, Ireland.
The product of a close-knit Irish Catholic family, O’Hara was the second oldest of six children.
When she was 14 she enrolled at the Abbey’s theatre school and within a year was playing Shakespearean roles. A close relation of Bridget Ryan, Newtown, herself and her mother would visit regularly and spend time in the town calling to all her extended family. Her husband Charles Ryan (better known as C.W.) was the last “Master of the Workhouse” until the office was abolished and the County Home was built. That marriage was dissolved in 1941, when she married writer and director Will Price. They had a daughter and divorced in 1953. When Blair was killed in a plane crash in 1978, she took his post as head of a Caribbean commuter airline. The couple lived in St Croix, in the Virgin Islands, and she largely left show business behind, choosing to publish a magazine, The Virgin Islander.
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Not long before she died at the weekend, Maureen O’Hara said her greatest achievement was being “the first person recognised as an Irishwoman all over the world”. O’Hara recalled that for a few reason he punched her hard in the jaw at a party. In the latter, O’Hara, who referred to Ford as “Pappy”, is the prize in a titanic struggle between Wayne’s Irish-American prize fighter and her brutish screen brother, played by Victor McLaglen (if you can believe it).
