The Quiet Woman

Maureen O’Hara, who brought the sizzle to Only the Lonely, has died at the age of 95. The Irish-American actress was one of the last stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, pairing toughness and humor with her stunning good looks, most notably in films with John Ford and/or John Wayne, like The Quiet Man, Rio Grande, The Wings of Eagles, How Green Was My Valley and McLintock! She spent nearly all her career opposite strong men, starting in her big break as the beauty to the beastly overacting of Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. When the screen was awash in swashbucklers, she rode The Black Swan with Tyrone Power and sampled Douglas Fairbanks, Jr as one of the first Sinbads. And of course, she went toe-to-toe with the biggest of them all, Kris Kringle, in the only version of Miracle on 34th Street worth watching, where she did a lousy job raising Natalie Wood. With the end of the black and white era, O’Hara became the Queen of Technicolor as the film process showed off her rich red hair, bright green eyes and flawless peaches-and-cream complexion. Unfortunately her non-Ford/Wayne roles seemed more interested in using her as scenery, and she retired for more than 20 years, when the prospect of protecting John Candy from the feminine wiles of Ally Sheedy in Only the Lonely proved too much to resist. Not that the woman who played the fiery Mary Kate Danaher could ever be satisfied baking cookies and making macramé flower pot holders. Her second husband was the founder and head of the U.S. Virgin Islands airline Antilles Air Boats, and after his death in a plane crash, she was elected CEO and president of the airline, making her the woman president of a scheduled airline in the U.S.