They
called Maureen O’Hara the Queen of Technicolor because she often starred in
color adventure films in the 1940s and ‘50s, tales of pirates with swordplay
and such like “The Black Swan” (1942) and “At Sword’s Point” (1952), where she
did some fencing herself. With her red hair and blooming complexion, she was
Irish through and through, and that went double for her feistiness, both on
screen and off.
In
the many films that O’Hara made with John Wayne, the Duke looked at her with deep
affection and usually offered some variation on the line, “You’re pretty when
you’re angry.” O’Hara was best known, finally, as Wayne’s favorite leading lady
and the center of many of John Ford’s best films, and to withstand that tough
duty she had to be formidable in her own right. This toughness was borne out by
the longevity of her life and career and buttressed by her distinctly Irish
talent for holding a grudge, which was revealed in her score-settling 2004
memoir “Tis Herself.”
O’Hara
was born Maureen FitzSimons in a suburb of Dublin, and she knew early that she
wanted to be an actress and received much training from the time she was a
little girl. Charles Laughton saw a screen test that O’Hara did as a teenager
and he was taken with the spirit and purity of her looks, so that she made her
screen debut with him in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Jamaica Inn” (1939) and was the
lovely and compassionate Esmeralda to his Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre
Dame” that same year.
Laughton
brought O’Hara out to Hollywood and sold her contract with him to RKO Pictures,
where she starred in Dorothy Arzner’s explicitly feminist “Dance, Girl, Dance”
(1940), at one point haranguing a group of rowdy men from a stage for their
Male Gaze rudeness. O’Hara was always most effective in scenes like this, scenes
where she could reveal the harshly certain, managerial quality underneath the
perfect beauty of her face. In Jean Renoir’s “This Land Is Mine” (1943), in
which the Nazis are occupying a town she works in, there are several points
where O’Hara’s near-awesome strength of purpose and outrage seem like they might
make the Nazis quake in their jackboots and flee.
But
she had a softer side, too, which John Ford utilized in their first film
together, “How Green Was My Valley” (1941), where her wedding veil rises up in
the air in a kind of phantom protest as her character marries the wrong man.
The implacability of O’Hara made her seem even worthier as a conquest, so that
you can understand Tyrone Power’s unfair pursuit of her in “The Black Swan,”
which has an unusually dirty script by Ben Hecht that places her in sexual
jeopardy at many turns. Her looks and talent could absorb and fortify the
sentimentality of a Christmas classic like “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947), but
she was far more intriguing in undervalued films like John M. Stahl’s “The
Foxes of Harrow” (1947) and Nicholas Ray’s “A Woman’s Secret” (1949), where her
rock-solid simplicity was contrasted with the squishy complexity of Gloria
Grahame.
O’Hara
would still be remembered today for her 1940s work, but it was in John Ford’s
“The Quiet Man” (1952) that she really secured her place and standing. As Mary
Kate Danaher, O’Hara is filmed in distinctively pearly Technicolor, moving
through the mists of Ireland as if she were a kind of sexual dream, a woman
worth fighting with and fighting for. When we remember O’Hara today, it should
be first and foremost as Mary Kate Danaher, inspiring John Wayne’s Sean Thornton
to play “patty fingers” in the holy water at church, goading him and then
refusing him on their wedding night when she feels her own integrity and
autonomy, the furniture and security of her dowry, has been unfairly taken away
from her. O’Hara’s Mary Kate is one of the sexiest and most enticing women in
film precisely because she is such an active and unyielding figure, such a
tower of strength. She is not easy, in any sense. But if you do battle for her,
your reward will be outsized beyond any man’s wildest conjugal fantasies.
O’Hara
played a few more times for Ford and also played a rather discreet Lady Godiva
on screen in 1955. In the early 1960s, she remained enterprising as the center
of Sam Peckinpah’s first film as a director, “The Deadly Companions” (1961) and
as the mother in the Disney favorite “The Parent Trap” that same year. O’Hara
did battle again with Wayne in the comedy western “McLintock!” (1963), where
she was as outraged and pretty as ever during an extended slapstick brawl.
There was one more film with Wayne, “Big Jake” (1971), before she retired for
twenty years, only returning in 1991 for the charming John Candy comedy “Only
the Lonely” and thereafter doing a few carefully selected TV vehicles.
As
an older woman, O’Hara remained remarkably unchanged in both looks and manner,
and there was something so reassuring about that; as she got into her 90s, she
began to decline a bit physically, but she was still as sharp as ever
underneath. She was given an honorary Oscar last year, just in the nick of
time, and at that ceremony and a recent TCM interview with Robert Osborne,
O’Hara was clearly ready to move on to another challenge. She had her Catholic
religious faith to bolster her, and that’s what seemed to be most on her mind
in these last appearances.
What
did Maureen O’Hara mean, as a screen presence and a movie star across many
years? She meant strength of purpose, lucky beauty intensified by flinty
internal character, and the surety that would never settle for less than her
due in the man’s world she inhabited. O’Hara never did reveal what Mary Kate
Danaher whispers to Sean Thornton at the end of “The Quiet Man,” taking that
secret with her to her grave. But that secret is maybe the password to forever
halt or ameliorate the battle of the sexes, and O’Hara’s Mary Kate still holds
that up to us as a beacon and a goal.
