With St. Patrick’s Day almost upon us, in this, the second of my attempts to honor women in film history during March, I need to get a bit personal.

Growing up, my red-haired sister and I always felt different, even though our parents, both of whom were of Irish descent, taught us to take a quiet pride in the achievements in arts, letters, and public life by the Irish around the world. While we adopted their low key approach to this ethnic pride as Irish-Americans, while honoring others in this melting pot, we soon learned that you just can’t blend in easily with a crowd when you have this unmanageable mop of red curls that refuse to behave. Short bobs, annoying barrettes and preventive measures to stave off the endless threat of some wickedly painful sunburns were sometimes our lot. People would literally stop us on the street to talk about this undeniable feature, asking us if we were from Ireland, much to our embarrassment.  Kids, being nature’s hard-core conformists, did enjoy pointing out regularly that we were “different.” That may not sound too bad, and it wasn’t, in retrospect, but phrases such as “red-headed stepchild” or comments about “fiery temperaments” really did make us feel a bit odd at times. Throughout history, the hair color, caused by a set of recessive chromosomes that have been reported in recent news stories as nearing extinction, has been the subject of fascination and quite often outright persecution.  I should probably be happy that I was born in a relatively benign era when titian-colored tresses didn’t get you burned at the stake, buried alive, mistaken for a vampire, or stoned at birth. 

In the midst of some of this ambivalence about our own nature, there was one woman whose presence in movies  on television was a huge influence–and, dare I say it, a role model. Maureen O’Hara, born Maureen FitzSimons just outside of Dublin in 1920, was a redhead who held her head high. Trained at the legendary Abbey Theatre,  she was brought over to the United States after appearing in a few movies, including Jamaica Inn directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The young actress was still in her teens when she was put under personal contract by Charles Laughton, (with his partner Erich Pommer). Appearing as the hauntingly beautiful gypsy girl, Esmeralda, opposite Laughton in director William Dieterle‘s seminal sound era version of Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), she started off as an unmistakable  star. With her beautiful hair, bone structure, and green eyes, she was one of the most arrestingly beautiful women who ever stepped in front of a camera, whether photographed in black and white or color. Herbert Kalmus, the developer of the color process , dubbed her “the Queen of Technicolor” due to the glorious effect of that coloring when photographed using his patented film process. Perhaps she could have coasted along on that beauty in Hollywood. Lots of actresses did that then and now. Yet there was something stronger and grittier in her screen persona.

Her appearances in numerous swashbuckling films opposite Tyrone Power in The Black Swan (1942), Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Sinbad the Sailor (1947) and Errol Flynn in Against All Flags (1952) were among our girlish favorites. My sister and I weren’t enchanted by the potential romance of the plots or the good looks of the male stars (that came later). It was her approach to the roles she played, especially when O’Hara took on the mantle of a pirate queen. We loved the imperious way that she would never take any guff, but would always toss her leonine mane, flair her nostrils, and dive into the fray to give as good–and frequently better–than she got. We loathed those actresses who, while the males tried to cut each other to ribbons or pummel each other senseless, would stand around looking worried and do nothing. Maureen O’Hara would rarely remain that passive. This actress displayed a  keen sense of justice and standing up for what she was due, even in the sometimes silly movies they cast her in during her tenure at RKO. Even when the more fantastic films asked us to believe that she was a brigand, an imperious noblewoman, or the daughter of a Caliph destined for a candy-colored harem, the way that she played these outlandish characters gave them more weight and reality than the script could ever conjure. More interestingly, as I now realize, most of her characters changed for the better over the course of the movie. The self-satisfied figures became more aware of her surroundings and the people around her after a period of uncertainty, anger and lots of displays of “being in high dudgeon”. (If those movies were made today, O’Hara would surely have been marketed as an action figure, if she had approval of all the details).

Based on a recent re-reading of her 2004 autobiography, ‘Tis Herself (Simon & Schuster), she developed those same characteristics off screen. Arriving in Hollywood, she nixed the cheesecake photos that were often de rigueur for new starlets at studios, refused to have her “too long” nose bobbed, and, in one of her first films after her contract had been sold by Laughton and Pommer to RKO, wound up decking the aggressively licentious John Farrow in front of a delighted cast and crew on the set of A Bill of Divorcement (1940). While working with some of the best directors (Dierterle, Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone, William Wellman, Carol Reed and others), the scripts were sometimes not up to standard, though a few gems along the way included the now beloved classic, Miracle on 34th Street (1947) as well as a neglected
small scale movie directed by Jean Negulesco just before that poet of black and white became ensnared in making some pretty ghastly color movies. Made in Britain, with an outstanding role for Dame Sybil Thorndyke, The Forbidden Street (1949) (aka Britannia Mews) features Maureen as an independently minded woman in Victorian England opposite Dana Andrews in a dual role that plays off his interestingly vulnerable screen persona.  Her collaboration with John Ford, however, beginning with the How Green Was My Valley (1941), in which her character’s love for Walter Pidgeon was thwarted by economic reality, became one of the most fruitful of both of their careers. The creative if sometimes painful working relationship with the occasionally difficult Ford led to several movies in which she was paired with John Wayne, (Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Wings of Eagles) that–despite their often stagey Irishness, (even when the story was actually set in Wales or the American Southwest), often focused on what Ford biographer Scott Eyman called ”the remarkably complex, mature explorations of all phases of adult love, from the strong sexual yearnings of courtship to the uneasy compromises of daily life to the bitter reality of separation and estrangement.” The rapport between Wayne and O’Hara was real, and, though not romantically involved, they remained life long friends. On screen, they brought out the latent strength and tenderness in one another, as well as a playfulness that gave their roles a quiet gravity. 

Ford, who characterized O’Hara as one of “the best actresses” seems to have been more than a bit in love with her, an understandable reaction to her beauty and dignity. Wisely, the actress, while fond of the married director and deeply respectful of his talent, did not reciprocate the lonely, alcoholic man’s feelings in the way that he wished. While many fondly recall the first sighting of her barefoot character in The Quiet Man and Wayne’s Sean Thornhill’s comment that “she can’t be real”, for me, two emblematic silent moments in her Ford films stand out. Both of these brief, but eloquent moments come in the flawed Wings of Eagles (1957). On the surface, the story is loosely based on the life of Navy man and screenwriter, Frank “Spig” Wead. John Ford indulges in his penchant for buffoonish humor throughout the first half of the movie, but, when the roistering naval aviation pioneer has a fall down a stairs, he and his wife, whose love for one another cannot bridge the gap between them, cannot save their marriage. The pain and hopelessness of this reality is vividly expressed.  O’Hara, playing the wife of John Wayne, after attempting to comfort him after an accident has left him partially paralyzed, is rejected by her proud husband who feels that their life together is over. Walking down a long corridor while the camera tracks back, her expression of anguish, rage and sorrow is written on her lovely face, making the scene speak volumes about a troubled marriage and its human cost. The other powerful moment in this film comes, when, after re-establishing herself in San Francisco as an independent woman, she is astounded to find Wayne on her doorstep on a Sunday morning after a period of estrangement. Reconciling once again, the director shoots part of this scene from the back of the chair in which John Wayne sits. As the two realize that once again, her husband’s sense of duty is far greater than his ability to maintain his ties to a wife and children, Maureen O’Hara places her hand on his shoulder briefly, in an acknowledgement of their love and their inevitable separation.

It’s possible that the actress brought some of her own experience and hard-won wisdom to bear on her roles and her wary relationship with John Ford. Married twice before finding deep happiness with aviation pioneer Charles F. Blair, Jr. , O’Hara officially retired to St. Croix and Ireland in the mid-sixties.

After Blair‘s death, she did make a fine return to the screen as the controlling mother of John Candy in the comedy with a few dramatic touches in Only the Lonely (1991). Perhaps surprisingly for a woman who had so many classic stars opposite her in movies, as she described it, Candy was one of her “all-time favorite leading men,”and one whose untapped depth of talent reminded her “a great deal of Charles Laughton.” Interestingly, when the movie was released to fine reviews for Ms. O’Hara‘s flinty characterization, she considered allowing her name to be placed in nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. After calling Academy board member, her friend of fifty years and her former co-star Roddy McDowell for advice on the decision, he counseled her that she should take the estimated $30k it takes to get oneself considered through advertising and “put it in a nice interest-earning CD.” Though he never had a chance to explain why before his own death, McDowell said that she “will never–ever–receive any recognition for anything you do from Hollywood.” Well, if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t eventually honor Maureen O’Hara properly, here’s one anonymous member of her audience who will always be thankful for her grace and fire as well as being a womanly redhead to admire, who helped me and my sister to enjoy “being different.”