Maureen FitzSimons was born August 17, 1920 and grew up in Ranelagh, Dublin of an Irish Catholic family. Maureen was the second oldest of the six children of Charles and Marguerite. Her father was in the clothing business and her mother was a former operatic contralto and a successful women’s clothier. Maureen had said that “When I was a child, I used to go down the garden, talk to the flowers and pretend I was the flower talking back to myself. I wanted to be an actress when I grew up.”
She wanted the freedom that boys had so she climbed trees, rode horses, went swimming, played soccer and took apples from orchards. She would boast to friends that she would “become the most famous actress in the world.” She began dancing at age 5 and would refer to her family as the “Irish von Trapp family.”
By age 10 she had joined the Rathmines Theatre Company and began working in amateur theatre in the evenings. She joined the Abbey Theatre at age 14 and at age 15 won the first Dramatic Prize of the national competition of the performing arts, the Dublin Feis Award. She learned to type and was a bookkeeper at the Everready Battery Company. She attended Dominican College and was graduated from the Guildhall School of Music.
“I was a blunt child. I told the truth and shamed all the devils. I didn’t take discipline very well,” she wrote in her autobiography ‘Tis Herself which became a bestseller in The New York Times Bestin 2004. Maureen was one of the longest-lived stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her nickname became “The Queen of Technicolor.”
In 1939 in her first major film role in Jamaica Inn, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, actor Charles Laughton insisted that she change her name to O’Hara. Her agent arranged for a pay increase from $80 a week to $700 a week. She played opposite Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame which proved to be a commercial success on took in $3 Million at the box office.
She appeared in many successful films such as Miracle on 34th Street, How Green Was My Valley, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Wings of Eagles, The Parent Trap, Only the Lonely, and The Black Swan.
It was a wisp of serendipity that I met her on a flight from Ireland a few years before her death. I recognized her when she walked down the aisle with her young caregiver. I stood up and said hello. In our short conversation, I asked her age and she said she was 88.
In a Vanity Fair magazine article she said that she “Loves feeling alive and being in motion. I would come back as myself because I have had such a great life and would do it all over again, but bigger and better the second time around. You can achieve any dream with hard work and the willingness to sacrifice.”
Maureen said her idea of perfect happiness was a perfect meal and her greatest fear was not getting into Heaven. She thought her greatest extravagance was milk chocolate. Her favorite journey was a ride to the Bray for a swim. She considered her greatest achievement was to be the first person recognized as an Irish woman all over the world. Her most treasured possession was her rosary. When asked how she would like to die she replied “On time.” She was happiest living in the Caribbean during the 1960s and 1970s with such lovely people. She would have liked to have been a better cook. The historical figure she most identified with was St. Patrick. The trait she most deplored in others was rudeness. When asked where she would like to live, she replied “Crikey! What a silly question. Ireland.”
Maureen O’Hara died October 24, 2015 in Boise, Idaho and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. She was married three times and bore one daughter.