Died Maureen O’Hara, star of Hollywood’s golden era – publico

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                 

 
 

Maureen O’Hara, known for her roles of untimely women – particularly alongside John Wayne in John Ford films – died Saturday at age 95. The redhead born in Ireland was one of the last stars of the era of Hollywood’s golden, with roles in The Quiet Man (1952) or The Valley Green Age (1941).

According to his manager, John Nicoletti, died at his home in Boise, in the US state of Idaho, surrounded by family and to listen “to your favorite music,” exactly the film The Quiet Man.

The actress, known as “Big Red” for his hair but also by the marked character of his characters, as recalls the journal Variety , was Natalie’s mother Wood in the classic christmas movie From Illusion Also If Vive – Miracle on 34th Street (1947), perhaps his best known film, and Mary Kate Danaher The Quiet Man .

Discovery by actor and later producer and director Charles Laughton – that changed the Fitzsimons family name him to the artistic O’Hara, actress debuted in the British cinema with small roles, coming to Hollywood with a stake in The Jamaica Inn , Alfred Hitchcock (where also worked Laughton) in 1938 and then taking in the sights as the Emerald of The Hunchback of Notre Dame Laughton (1939).

With Laughton would run even in 1944, This Land is Mine , by Jean Renoir, one of the most courageous approaches to Hollywood after World War II and moral complexity of the issues of “resistance” and “collaboration” in occupied France, and where Maureen was using the most stoic size and more “vertical” of his film personality.

But it was The Valley Green Age and John Ford who turned it into a kind of icon – she is waving at the gate, beautiful and smiling, an emblematic plan of an era of cinema. It came to be promoted, with the advent of color film, as the “Queen of Technicolor”. As in the case of pirates of films I entered, the sublime The Black Swan (Henry King, 1942), and The Spanish Main (Frank Borzage, 1945), where the his red beauty exploded among the thousand colors of Technicolor.

The film would win the Oscar for Best Picture at a time when O’Hara had already obtained US citizenship and took root in the country would do the rest of his career. Described his childhood, with many brothers and with access to the theater education, fencing or singing as part “of Von Irish Trapp family”, as once said the British daily The Independent . Hence stemmed his confidence as an actress and his voluntarism.

With Ford and Wayne again, return to shooting in Rio Grande (1950) and The Eagle Fly to the Sun (1957) and, already without John Wayne but with Tyrone Power A Lifetime (1955), also from Ford. How would you describe later in his biography, signed by its manager John Nicoletti, ‘ Tis Herself, the director sent him love letters and has even punch -la in the face without explanation – Ford was “gifted and intolerable”, quotes the Washington Post , thus treating its stars, including Wayne or Jimmy Stewart.

O’Hara also work in television and theater, and sang his last film in the cinema was You, Me and Mom (1990), with John Candy. His last work was a TV movie, ten years later, The Last Dance . Last year he received an honorary Oscar for his career.

It was the last big superstar, and great actress, survivor of the classic era of Hollywood, the living memory of those distant golden decades that the American cinema lived between the years 30 and 50s With her death, Hollywood dies a little more.