It’s not unusual to find Irish Americans who can recite, verbatim, scenes from The Quiet Man, the John Ford classic that has come to epitomize romantic Ireland for a generation of Irish Americans.
Every year at St. Patrick’s time, the movie is trotted out again on dozens of channels across the U.S. Like wine it seems to improve with age, and the image of Maureen O’Hara, the flame-haired colleen giving John Wayne as good as she got, has become embedded in popular lore.
O’Hara has become a living legend, as a result. At any public appearance she is mobbed. Indeed, a new generation of fans seems to have taken her to its heart, and now in her late sixties, she thrives on the outpouring of affection.
She is also making a comeback in the movies. After an absence of nineteen years, she will play John Candy’s mother in an upcoming film entitled Only the Lonely.
Moviemaker Chris Columbus who directed Home Alone, the hit movie of 1990, persuaded Maureen to make a comeback. “It took four weeks to even find her,” he told Irish Voice columnist Joe Murphy.
“There was no agent to go to and she has houses in L.A., New York, Virgin Islands and Ireland. I’m not a great salesman at all but she liked the script. That’s how I got the meeting with her.”
Columbus loved working with her.
“One night it was 5 p.m. to 5 a.m and she was still incredible.”
For her own part, O’Hara told Murphy she was delighted to be back on the silver screen. “It felt good to be back in a role again. I hope it comes out well. We had many wonderful people working for us.” Born Maureen FitzSimons in Dublin, she was a member of a famous theatrical family and soon made her way to the stage of the Abbey Theatre, where she was offered her first lead role in 1939.
Soon thereafter, she went to England for a screen test, and encountered Charles Laughton, who asked her to read a new script he had prepared. Bewitched, he offered her a seven-year contract with Mayflower Pictures.
Her name change occurred through Laughton as well. “We want to change your name to O’Mara or O’Hara,” he told her. “Neither one,” Maureen replied. “Very well, it’s O’Hara,” he said, and a screen legend was born.
Jamaica Inn, in which she starred with Laughton, was her first major role.
How did she feel at seeing herself on screen? “Well I was a little shocked and I wished I could do it all over again,” she told Irish America in an interview.
In contrast to today’s pampered stars, O’Hara had a tough grind. Early in her career she did up to five movies a year; overexposure was not a word in her lexicon. Only when the draconian Hollywood contract system was broken by Olivia De Havilland did actors and actresses get more freedom to pick and choose.
When Fox studios bought half of her contract from RKO, they hardly realized they were setting the stage for one of the great screen partnerships. The director John Ford, (real name Sean O’Feeney) wanted O’Hara for How Green Was My Valley, telling her, “You’re the best bloody actress in Hollywood.”
It was in the John Ford Irish group that she got to know John Wayne and other leading actors of the period. They would all go along to Ford’s house for dinner or a buffet. O’Hara remembers that Ford’s wife Mary used to say, “Oh God, I’m getting nothing but Irish tonight,” and that John Wayne would sing a song about Mary, but “the whole joke was he’d sing it off key.”
In 1944 she made a shake-hands agreement with Ford to make The Quiet Man. He already had agreements with John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, Barry FitzGerald and Arthur Shields.
The movie was not a popular project with the major studios, who dismissed it as a silly Irish story.” Eventually Republic Pictures took it on the condition that Wayne and company would make Rio Grande, a western, first, to raise the money for The Quiet Man.
It was a family affair. The kids in the horse race sequence were Wayne’s kids; the young priest was Maureen’s brother. The head of the IRA was her other brother.
John Ford’s brother played a villager and his son Pat, did some of the horseback riding.
Her relationship with Wayne was combative. “He used to dare me about certain things. I liked him, but as two people, not as a man and a woman. I used to know all his girlfriends.”
There were other great movies, most notably, The Long Grey Line, How Green Was My Valley, (she named her daughter Bronwyn after the character in the film) and Miracle on 34th Street, but marriage to Charles Blair brought retirement in the 60s.
Now that Maureen O’Hara is back, her legion of fans can hardly wait, for Ireland’s leading lady will once again be lighting up the screen.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦
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