Maureen O’Hara obituary

In the early 1950s the prevailing image of Maureen O’Hara, who has died aged 95, was one of a feisty heroine, red hair blazing, who was more than a match for her male co-stars. Big John “Duke” Wayne, whom she partnered in five films, said of her: “I’ve had many male friends in my life except for one, O’Hara; and she’s a great guy.” The great director John Ford, with whom she also worked so often, referred to her as “a man’s kind of woman”.

In The Quiet Man (1952), Ford’s Irish pastoral-romantic-comedy, the blue-bloused, scarlet-skirted, bare-footed O’Hara, as Mary Kate Danaher, is first seen by Wayne as she tends her sheep. “Hey, is that real?” he asks. “She couldn’t be.” At their second meeting Wayne tries to kiss her, and she tries to sock him. “Watch that scene, and you’ll see Duke put his hand up,” O’Hara once said. “He deflects my blow because he knew me so well. He knew I was for real. I was hitting him.”

Wayne’s defensive action had unintended consequences. “The pain went up under my armpit,” she said. “[Afterwards] Duke came up to me and said, ‘godammit, you nearly knocked my head off. Let me see your hand.’ Each finger was like a sausage [and] they sent me to hospital.”

Ford declared O’Hara to be “the best bloody actress in Hollywood”. She certainly was not that, but Ford, who had Irish roots, brought out her warmth and “Irishness,” and she became an important element in his repertory company. Their relationship was never easy, but O’Hara loved the results of working with him. “So many films we made crying in our heart as we went to work every day,” O’Hara recalled, “but a great role in a great movie with somebody like John Fordwas never difficult. That was heaven, even though you wanted to kill him.”

O’Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons, the second of six children, in a suburb of Dublin. Her mother was an accomplished contralto, and her father, a businessman, part-owned Shamrock Rovers football team. “We grew up on sport and music. All the great singers that would come to visit Dublin would come to our house for a musical evening,” she said. “We six kids, we used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen.”