Saturday 24 October 2015

HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS MAUREEN O'HARA DIES AT 95.


Hollywood actress Maureen O'Hara, famous for her roles in The Quiet Man and Miracle on 34th Street, has died of natural causes, aged 95.
Johnny Nicoletti, longtime manager to the Irish star, said she had died in her sleep at home in Boise, Idaho.
"She passed peacefully surrounded by her loving family as
they celebrated her life listening to music from her favourite movie The Quiet Man," her family said in a statement.
According to a family biography, 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."
O'Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons near Dublin in 1920, one of six children of a well-known opera singer mother and father who owned football teams. It was through her mother that she discovered a love of the theatre.
In 1999, she recalled: "My first ambition was to be the number one actress in the world,.
"And when the whole world bowed at my feet, I would retire in glory and never do anything again."
Her first marriage - to director George Hanley Brown - was annulled when she moved to Hollywood and he remained in England.
Her move to Hollywood in 1939 was for the film The Hunchback of Notre Dame and this began a long career, which also included roles in the 1941 coal-mining family saga How Green Was My Valley and the 1959 film Our Man In Havana.
She became known as the Queen of Technicolour, because of the camera's love affair with her flame-red hair.
In 1941, she married director Will Price and they had a daughter Bronwyn three years later. But she later described the marriage as "a terrible mistake" and the couple divorced in 1952.
In 1968, she married her third husband Brigadier General Charles Blair, quitting her film career to live with him in the Virgin Islands, where he was an airline boss.
He died in a plane crash 10 years later but she later remembered the marriage as "the best time of my life".
O'Hara is survived by her daughter Bronwyn FitzSimons, who lives in Glengarriff, Ireland, her grandson Conor FitzSimons who lives in Boise, Idaho, and two great-grandchildren.
(News source-CNN)

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