Maureen O'Hara

Born: 17 August 1920
Where: Ranelagh, near Dublin, Ireland

Red-haired Irish beauty Maureen played a variety of good-hearted yet headstrong heroines in the 1940s and 50s.

She began acting at the age of six performing on radio.

In 1934 O'Hara joined the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as an ingénue at age 14 before testing for screen in London at age 16.

Stage and screen star Charles Laughton had Maureen O'Hara change her surname from Fitzsimons and helped her get cast in several of her earliest films, including Jamaica Inn (1939), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Her first US credit was a performance as Esmeralda opposite Laughton as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939).

Her looks were set off in glowing Technicolor in many swashbuckling adventures, but the ever feisty O'Hara was also at home in contemporary comedy.

O'Hara continued playing female leads in films into the mid-60s, but virtually retired from features after 1971's Big Jake, her fifth and final film opposite John Wayne.

O'Hara settled in St. Croix, Virgin Islands with her third husband, an aviation pioneer and, after his death in a 1978 plane crash, ran his commuter airline for a period.

In 1991, she returned to the screen to play the domineering mother of John Candy in the comedy Only the Lonely.