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Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O'Hara

A favorite of director John Ford.

Aunt of Charles F. FitzSimons.

Brought to Hollywoood by actor Charles Laughton.

Crack typist who typed some of her own scripts/rewrites.

Daughter: Bronwyn FitzSimons.



Did many of her own stunts in her films.

Grandmother of C. Beau Fitzsimons.

Had a second career after retiring as a successful Magazine Publisher; one of the reasons was to help keep her from becoming bored after retirement.

In 1939, at the age of 19, Maureen O'Hara secretly married Englishman George H. Brown, a film producer, production assistant and occasional scriptwriter whose best known work is the first of Margaret Rutherford's 1960s Miss Marple mysteries, Murder She Said. The marriage was annulled in 1941.

In 1941, O'Hara married American film director William Houston Price (dialog director in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), but the union ended in 1953, reportedly as a result of his alcohol abuse.

In 1946, O'Hara became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1960, O'Hara starred on Broadway in the hit musical Christine, for which she won the Tony Award, the Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Sarah Siddons Award, all in the category of the year's best leading actress in a musical.

In 2004, Maureen O'Hara released her autobiography 'Tis Herself, published by Simon & Schuster.

In 2004, Maureen O'Hara was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Film and Television Academy in her native Dublin.

In addition to her acting skills, Maureen O'Hara had a soprano voice and described singing as her first love.

In Italy, most of her films were dubbed by Lidia Simoneschi. She was occasionally dubbed by Dhia Cristiani, most notably in Sitting Pretty (1948); by Rosetta Calavetta and once by Paola Barbara in the multi Oscar-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941).

In the early 40s, was one of the actresses invited to the White House for a benefit dinner, she sat right next to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1993.

Lost her husband Charles Blair and her best friend John Wayne within months of each other.

Maureen O'Hara donated her late husband's (Charles F. Blair, Jr.) Sikorsky VS-44A seaplane, "The Queen of the Skies", to the New England Air Museum. The restoration of the plane took 8 years and time was donated by former pilots and mechanics in honor of Blair (who was a pioneer of transatlantic aviation, a former Brigadier General of the U.S. Air Force, and a former Chief Pilot at Pan Am). It is the only surviving example of this type of plane.

The New England Air Museum (NEAM) is located at Bradley International Airport, Windsor Locks, Connecticut. The museum is housed in three large display buildings consisting of more than 75,000 square feet of exhibit space. Exhibits include the history of Sikorsky Aircraft, early war aircraft, early French aviation featuring the Lafayette Escadrille, a history of air mail, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Flying Mollisons, and the 58th Bomb Wing Memorial.

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