Maureen O'Hara

Maureen FitzSimons (17 August 1920 until 24 October 2015) was an Irish actress, singer and performer who gained fame in Hollywood from 1940s until the 1960s. Her natural redhead look was a draw for her strong and intelligent characters in Westerns and adventure movies. Charles Laughton, an actor who was the first to see her star-making potential, brought her to Hollywood. On numerous occasions she also collaborated with John Ford, longtime friend John Wayne and John Ford. O'Hara was born in Dublin, Ireland and was raised Catholic. She set out from at an early age to be an actor. She began her training with the Rathmines Theatre Company from the age of 10 and at the Abbey Theatre at the age of 14. After getting through a screen test she was not accepted. However, Charles Laughton recognized her potential and offered to have her star in Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn in 1939. RKO Pictures offered her a contract. The actress also moved to Hollywood in 1939 to appear alongside Hitchcock in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She had a lengthy, highly successful career, and was dubbed "the Queen of Technicolor". She appeared in films such as How Green Was My Valley (1941) (her first collaboration with John Ford), The Black Swan with Tyrone Power (1942), The Spanish Main (1945), Sinbad the Sailor (1947) and the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947) with John Payne and Natalie Wood and Comanche Territory (1950). O'Hara directed her first film in collaboration with John Wayne, the actor with whom she is most closely with, in Rio Grande (1950). The Quiet Man (1952) The Wings of Eagles(57), McLintock were the subsequent films. (1963) and Big Jake (2001). A lot of people believed that Wayne and O'Hara were in a relationship or married due to their intense connection. In the 1960s, O'Hara increasingly turned to more motherly roles as she aged, appearing in films such as The Deadly Companions (1961), The Parent Trap (1961) and The Rare Breed (1966). O'Hara resigned from the film industry in 1971. She returned to the business twenty years later and appeared in John Candy (1991).