Movie actress Maureen O’Hara dies at age 95

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

Maureen O’Hara, the flame-haired Irish movie star who appeared in classics ranging from the grim “How Green Was My Valley” to the uplifting “Miracle on 34th Street” and bantered unforgettably with John Wayne in several films, has died. She was 95.

O’Hara died in her sleep at her home in Boise, Idaho, said Johnny Nicoletti, her longtime manager.

“She passed peacefully surrounded by her loving family as they celebrated her life listening to music from her favorite movie, ‘The Quiet Man,’” said a statement from her family.

“As an actress, Maureen O’Hara brought unyielding strength and sudden sensitivity to every role she played. Her characters were feisty and fearless, just as she was in real life. She was also proudly Irish and spent her entire lifetime sharing her heritage and the wonderful culture of the Emerald Isle with the world,” said a family biography.

O’Hara came to Hollywood to star in the 1939 “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and went on to a long career.

During her movie heyday, she became known as the Queen of Technicolor because of the camera’s love affair with her vivid hair, pale complexion and fiery nature.

But she also had talent.

She never was nominated for a competitive Oscar but received an honorary Academy Award last year.

After her start in Hollywood with “Hunchback” and some minor films at RKO, she was borrowed by 20th Century Fox to play the beautiful young daughter in the 1941 saga of a coal-mining family, “How Green Was My Valley.”

“How Green Was My Valley” went on to win five Oscars including best picture and best director for John Ford, beating out Orson Welles and “Citizen Kane” among others. It was the first of several films she made under the direction of Ford.

The popularity of “How Green Was My Valley” confirmed O’Hara’s status as a Hollywood star. RKO and Fox shared her contract, and her most-successful films were made at Fox.

They included “Miracle on 34th Street,” the classic 1947 Christmas story in which O’Hara was little Natalie Wood’s skeptical mother and among those charmed by Edmund Gwenn as a man who believed he was Santa Claus.

With Ford’s “Rio Grande” in 1950, O’Hara became Wayne’s favorite leading lady. The most successful of their five films was 1952’s “The Quiet Man,” also directed by Ford.

O’Hara’s other movies with Wayne were “The Wings of Eagles” (1957), “McClintock!” (1963) and “Big Jake” (1971).

After her studio contracts ended, she remained busy. She played the mother of twins, both played by Hayley Mills, who conspire to reunite their divorced parents in the 1961 Disney comedy “The Parent Trap.”

She also was in “Spencer’s Mountain” with Henry Fonda (1963), a precursor to TV’s “The Waltons,” and a Western, “The Rare Breed,” with James Stewart (1966).

She returned to movies in 1991 for a role that writer-director Chris Columbus, a Warren JFK graduate, had written especially for her, as John Candy’s feisty mother in a sentimental drama, “Only the Lonely.” It was not a box-office success.