Why wait until St. Patrick's Day?

Most loyal readers of this blog do not know that I was born in Northern Ireland to a beautiful, but fiery, young lady who, while not born a redhead, later became one for many years. Her cinematic counterpart, in several ways, is the lovely, yet firm-minded, Miss Maureen O’Hara.

Born Maureen Fitzsimons in Dublin in 1920 to a successful businessman and an opera singer-turned-women’s clothier, she longed to grow up and become an operatic vocalist like her mother. Her father, endowed with stern Irish practicality, insisted that Maureen learn some sort of trade to fall back on in case her singing career didn’t pan out. (My mother and I had many similar battles when I had aspirations to sing and act and, though I later was able to do both, primarily as a hobby, she was right in wanting me to have a secure education and/or skill!)

While in training at The Abbey Theater and the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution (one hopes they had a nickname for that place!), she excelled and won any number of local awards. Still, she learned shorthand and typing and also succeeded tremendously with those skills.

While still in her teens, she won a couple of bit parts in English movies and was granted a screen test that most viewers dismissed as unsatisfactory. However, the great British actor Charles Laughton was shown the test and fell in love with Maureen’s haunting, soulful eyes. He was in the midst of preparing his upcoming film for Alfred Hitchcock, Jamaica Inn, and got her cast in the female leading role, putting her under contract to his own fledgling film company as well.

The world at that time was obsessed with an American of Irish descent, the fictional heroine Scarlett O’Hara of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The legendary search for Scarlett had taken place and the film version was underway. Laughton renamed Maureen Fitzsimons as Maureen O’Hara and made plans to take her to America with him for his next film.

That film was the classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame and O’Hara played the gypsy girl Esmeralda who is alternately saved by the title outcast and fearful of him. It was an auspicious start to her Hollywood career, but the outbreak of WWII interfered with her burgeoning progress. Laughton, unable to continue with the film company he’d started, sold her option to RKO Studios in Hollywood.

Here, she floundered briefly, stuck in low-budget projects and musicals in which her own great voice was never once put to use. When John Ford (another person with an Irish heritage) directed How Green Was My Valley, a film about a Welsh mining family, he used O’Hara in a featured role and the film was a stunning success. It might have signaled a strong change in the course of her career, but Ford left to take part in WWII filmmaking shortly after, not returning to Hollywood until 1945.

She was next seen in color in To the Shores of Tripoli, playing a nurse against John Payne’s marine, followed by Ten Gentlemen from West Point, in which she played a pretty socialite involved with Errol Flynn during the time that the training academy was first formed. Then she starred with Tyrone Power in the colorful pirate movie The Black Swan. In these early color films, her red hair was (purposefully?) darker than it would later be. In time, her striking coloring would be exploited with more emphasis.

She continued on, making films for such esteemed directors as William Wellman and Jean Renoir and working with costars such as Henry Fonda, John Garfield and her old pal Laughton. (Laughton, it should be noted, had only a platonic interest in O’Hara, being a homosexual married for convenience to Elsa Lanchester.)

O’Hara’s beauty was revealed in various period films, whether they be pirate movies like The Spanish Main (pictured here with Paul Henreid. Note her strong profile and ornate hairstyle) or westerns or even Arabian style escapades like Sinbad the Sailor starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Another costar, pictured with her here, is a trim, handsome Anthony Quinn. O’Hara and Quinn made five pictures together from the early 40s to the mid 50s, a fact that would come into play for her fans later on.

In 1947, O’Hara starred in what would become an immortal classic, one that is enjoyed by millions every year. She played the no-nonsense mother of precocious Natalie Wood in the Christmas-themed Miracle on 34th Street. Edmund Gwenn won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Kris Kringle. Reunited with her To the Shores of Tripoli costar John Payne as an attentive suitor, she and the whole cast worked in harmony to create a film that is held dear to multitudes of viewers.

The next couple of years were busy ones, but ones without any films of significant distinction, though she transported though many different genres including adventure, film noir, comedy and so on. Then John Ford decided to make his film, The Quiet Man, set (and filmed) in Ireland. He wanted to use his frequent collaborator John Wayne, along with Maureen, but the president of Republic Pictures insisted that the film’s script was weak and made Ford put it off, requesting that he first use Wayne and O’Hara in the final chapter of Ford’s cavalry trilogy Rio Grande. His plan was for Rio Grande’s success to pay for The Quiet Man, whose location filming might prove costly.

As it turned out, when The Quiet Man was released two years later (O’Hara having made three films in between Rio Grande and it), it was a major success, the number one money-earner for the studio. Wayne and O’Hara played tempestuous lovers who share a remarkable moment during a hellacious windstorm and their spirited chemistry together led to a lifelong friendship and five costarring films in all. TCM sometimes runs an interview with O’Hara about the filming of that scene and it is hilarious. Ford kept shooting take after take as her hair was whipping her in the face repeatedly, but not to his satisfaction. Finally, she lost her temper and asked him what a one-eyed, bald bastard like him knew about hair hitting the face! While The Quiet Man was in pre-production, she used her still-sharp secretarial skills to transcribe script notes for him as he dictated!

She next re-teamed with Errol Flynn for the swashbuckling Against All Flags, more than holding her own in the swordplay sequences. Always an athletic type as a young girl, her abilities in this area gave her quite an asset when it came to performing stunts and feats. Still, her best work and most important films seemed to be when she was working for Ford or costarring with a familiar actor. Her swashbuckling adventures did cost her the lead role in the film version of The King and I (in which she'd have been excellent), however, when Richard Rodgers exclaimed that he didn't want "a pirate queen" in his movie.

In 1955, she filmed The Long Gray Line, a Ford drama about an Irish immigrant (played by Tyrone Power) who spends 50 years at West Point, gaining in position from a dishwasher to an officer. It was in preproduction for this film that she claims to have walked in on the craggy, rough Ford in a romantic embrace with another man, a known actor (not Power, though he certainly had more than a few rumors about him as well.) This bombshell was nestled blithely within her 2004 autobiography.

That same year, she made the very tame, but nonetheless daring for its time, film Lady Godiva of Coventry and took a scantily clad ride in protest of her husband’s policies. The stagnant film didn’t begin to deliver on its provocative advertising scheme, nor had it any chance to do so in 1955.

As the decade drew to a close, she was working somewhat less, but still collaborated with Ford and Wayne (in The Wings of Eagles) and even starred with Sir Alec Guinness in the light spy film Our Man in Havana. One of her most significant achievements during this time was the suing of Confidential magazine. The mudslinging gossip rag held Hollywood by the throat in the early 50s with its threats of outing gay actors or otherwise unearthing hidden scandals. What the publishers couldn’t prove, they made up. She was accused in its March 1957 issue of having indulged in lewd behavior in the balcony of Graumann’s Chinese Theatre and, thanks to her passport, was able to prove that she hadn’t even been in the country at the time of the alleged story. Her suit (and sizeable settlement) was instrumental in leading to the eventual demise of the magazine, earning her applause from her peers.

Maureen took part in another enduring family classic when she paired up with Brian Keith in Disney's The Parent Trap. Playing the divorced parents of twins (both played by Hayley Mills), their still-festering love for one another was reignited by a conspiracy involving the girls. This film resonated for years afterward on TV and in re-release, leading to a few TV-movie sequels starring Mills and a 1998 remake.

Things got a little sticky, however, during the western The Deadly Companions, in which they quickly re-teamed. O’Hara’s brother Charles Fitzsimons was producing the film and had brought on novice director Sam Peckinpah at costar Brian Keith’s suggestion. (Peckinpah had recently produced and directed Keith’s short-lived TV series The Westerner.) However, Fitzsimons and Peckinpah did not get along (with Peckinpah claiming that the producer wouldn’t let him give his sister any direction, nor let him rewrite or edit) and from then on Peckinpah would demand control of his movies.

In the early 60s, O’Hara played wife to several of Hollywood’s older leading men. In Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, her husband was James Stewart. Then she portrayed the wife of Henry Fonda in the film Spencer’s Mountain, based on the same novel that would later give rise to The Waltons TV series. She and Fonda played the parents of a staggering brood of children. Notable among them was James McArthur as Clayboy (who would be renamed in the series as “Johnboy”), Veronica Cartright of The Birds fame and Kym Karath who would appear a short time later as Gretl in The Sound of Music along with Veronica's sister Angela.

The film featured some elements (including alcoholism and infidelity) that were, initially at least, left out of the later TV show. However, the family’s struggle to make ends meet and permit their eldest son to go to college remained, along with other similarities. O’Hara, approaching 90 years of age as of this writing, has long outlived these famous male costars one and all.

McLintock!, a rowdy western comedy, saw O’Hara and her pal Wayne as feuding spouses and was loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Like that famous work, this film included the hero giving the heroine a much-deserved spanking as a crowd of onlookers react vigorously.

Around this time, Maureen began appearing with some frequency on TV variety shows and specials, allowing her the opportunity to sing as she had always wanted to do. She appeared in the 1960 Broadway musical Christine and even released two albums, one of which was comprised of Irish songs. In this cover shot for a program guide, she does something brave that I would never attempt. She poses next to a lit candelabra while wearing copious amounts of hairspray!

She worked with James Stewart again in 1966’s The Rare Breed about the acquisition of a Hereford bull. Having played Hayley Mills’ mom in The Parent Trap, here he played Juliet Mills’ mother. (She and Juliet had previously worked together in a TV adaptation of Mrs. Miniver in 1960, however.)

After 1971’s Big Jake, which paired her with John Wayne for the last time (in a brief role as, what else, his estranged wife!), Maureen retired from the big screen. She did do a 1973 TV movie opposite Henry Fonda called The Red Pony, but was, for the most part, entirely out of the public eye. Having lost her pilot husband in a 1968 plane crash, she kept busy with interest in his airline company and resided in the US Virgin Islands.

Twenty years after her last feature film, she was coaxed out of retirement by Chris Columbus for his John Candy comedy Only the Lonely. The role of an overbearing, politically incorrect mother was written with her in mind. Columbus gave the script to Maureen’s producer brother and he encouraged her to do the film. After reading the script, and meeting with Candy, she enthusiastically agreed. Her character spouted all sorts of insensitive and potentially explosive remarks and O’Hara gamely took part in several fantasy sequences in which Candy dreamed of doing her in.

On the set, Candy was appalled that someone of her stature was given a shoddy, tiny trailer and demanded a better one. When it didn’t happen, he gave her his luxurious trailer and slept on an old cot until the producers relented. Even at 71, she had to be deglammed in order to look appropriate for the part. There are parts of this film in which it may as well be my own mother onscreen.

Cast as her charming Greek neighbor was Anthony Quinn, her costar in five prior movies. While, to the movie going public in general, these were just two old bats, for fans of the stars, it marked a tender and entertaining reunion of two pros from the golden era of the cinema.

In the wake of this, O’Hara retreated to her various homes in Ireland, Arizona and The Virgin Islands, but occasionally emerged to film a TV movie. She did three of them between the years 1995 and 2000. Then, in 2004, she penned her book and embarked on a tour with that. Still quite lovely and stunning, even in her mid 80s, she charmed everyone with her glowing smile and still gorgeous eyes, always turned out in the style she no doubt inherited from her mother. She has several interview snippets on TCM that are played in between movies and she is invariably witty, beautiful and full of hilarious anecdotes.

While it is true that Maureen O’Hara never really carried a hit film solely on her own, she was an integral part of several bona fide cinema classics and by that I mean true classics, not just films that are referred to that way because they’re old. She also provided lustrous support for many of Hollywood’s greatest actors. Fonda, Wayne, Quinn, Stewart… all were the recipients of an Oscar and yet O’Hara was never once nominated. It makes me physically ill to dwell on some of the actresses who not only have been nominated but have also have been given a statuette when she has not and I continue to scratch my head as to why she has not been awarded an Honorary Oscar. I hope someone wakes up the Academy before it is too late, because it is truly deserved. In any case, she’s given me many hours of delight as I’ve watched her films over the years.

Learning About Alain

When they whip up sketches of my perfect man, he nearly always has the combination of dark hair and blue eyes. Clint Walker is about as close to my ideal as a body can get, but many others come close, including Van Williams, Paul Newman and, certainly in the area of amazing eyes, today’s featured French actor. When it comes to him, I have A.D.D. (Alain Delon Disorder!)

Delon was born in 1935 to parents who divorced when he was four. A rebel practically from the get-go, he was continually expelled from boarding schools. He worked for a while, at age 14, in his father’s butcher shop, but eventually went off to join the French Navy. Even then, still the rabble-rouser, he claims to have spent almost one-fourth of his four years in the service in prison! He received a dishonorable discharge in 1956.

Working any number of odd jobs back in Paris, he somehow befriended actress Brigitte Auber (best known for her role opposite Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief) and went to the Cannes Film Festival with her. (Some sources list fellow French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, his lifelong – and gay - friend, as the person with whom he tagged along.) Notorious talent agent (at that time a scout for David O. Selznick) Henry Willson spotted Delon in a disco and arranged a screen test at Rome’s Cinecitta Studio for him. The test resulted in a contract offer, but Selznick’s film output was virtually nil (in fact, he never made another movie after this time) so Delon opted instead to stay in France and work there. The contract was dissolved.

After working in a few films, he was cast as Romy Schneider’s leading man in Christine and the pair became a couple off-screen as well. They were together several years, even working on stage in a play for several months, but eventually split up (though they would continue to work together occasionally.)

In 1960, he landed the role of Tom Ripley in Purple Noon (an adaptation of the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, later remade with Matt Damon and Jude Law.) The story of a parasitic young man who attaches himself to, and eventually wishes to become, a wealthy and popular playboy, was a major success. Shot in color, the cinematography played up Delon’s physical beauty (a number of scenes occurred on the water, affording glimpses of his toned body.) I have to scream it again: The EYES!

Delon did not continue to capitalize solely on his looks and physique, however, and swiftly went into the gangster film Rocco and his Brothers. It was the start of a series of films for him in which he would play gangster types, some bearing a degree of honor, others ruthless. Rocco was directed by esteemed director Luchino Visconti and he would later cast Delon in another of his important roles.

After working in several more French films and beginning to make a name for himself, Delon went back to Visconti for The Leopard, an epic film featuring Burt Lancaster as the patriarch of an aristocratic family that is affected by the upheavals taking place in mid-19th century Sicily.

Delon and Claudia Cardinale portray a young couple (described by Leonard Maltin as “close to the final word in romantic pairings”) caught up in the tumult. The lavish, lengthy film (cut down in many of the prints) features a famous 40 minute banquet sequence at the finale and is considered by many to be among the best films ever made.

Delon continued to work with some of the best directors that Europe had to offer and, along the way, was costarred with notable names such as Brigitte Bardot, Monica Vitti, Jean Gabin and even Jane Fonda. In 1964, he was placed in the sizeable ensemble of The Yellow Rolls Royce. Though the film starred Rex Harrison and Ingrid Bergman in vignettes, he was part of one that featured Shirley MacLaine and Art Carney. See if you don’t see a resemblance between Shirl and Renee Zellweger in these shots!

As a photographer who starts to fall for the moll of a big shot gangster who has left her in the care of one of his bodyguards, Delon was photographed in beautiful color. He was also, however, slathered down in tan body makeup (not that there’s anything wrong with that. It brought his eyes out even more!) One segment had him trotting around in a hilarious bathing suit that included a built-in white tank top, but somehow he remained sexy in it.

Next up, in 1965, he was teamed with Ann-Margret in Once a Thief. Filmed in San Francisco, Delon played a husband and father with a criminal past, having trouble staying on the straight and narrow when an old enemy of his tries to blame him for a murder. This was part of a fairly brief period in which Alain made films either in America or at least made in English.

In Lost Command, he joined Anthony Quinn and George Segal (as well as former Purple Noon costar Maurice Ronet and former The Leopard partner Cardinale.) It focused on the French occupation of Algeria. His military-oriented phase continued with Is Paris Burning?, one of the then-fashionable “spot the star” epics about German evacuation from Paris following their loss of WWII. Good or bad, the cast assembled for the film is indeed jaw dropping.

One of Alain’s loonier credits came in the Dean Martin western farce Texas Across the River. He played a titled Spaniard who winds up exchanging his fancy duds for deer-hide amidst a lot of fighting, hollering and, truth be told, mugging as he and Dino take on longhorn steers, Comanches and the US Cavalry.

1968 brought the film Spirits of the Dead, which featured three Edgar Allan Poe stories, each done by a famous director. Here he was re-teamed with Bardot and directed by Louis Malle. Roger Vadim and Federico Fellini directed the other stories. This was a busy time for him and he worked on many varied projects. In Girl on a Motorcycle, he played the sexy lover of Marianne Faithful, a wife who has run out on her milquetoast teacher husband in order to gear up in leather and zip off to a new life. Next came Honor Among Thieves. Here, Delon was paired with Charles Bronson as former French Foreign Legion officers who run into one another in civilian life, but at cross-purposes. The film’s most memorable sequence has the men locked in a sweltering room, requiring them to doff their shirts as suffocation looms.

Delon reunited with Romy Schneider (and Purple Noon’s Ronet again) for The Swimming Pool. This atmospheric, but slllooooww, movie about a love triangle that ends in murder mainly serves as an excuse to see Mr. D. and his lover in abbreviated swimwear (and this is not a complaint!) Publicity photos of Alain lounging in and around a pool have kept collectors busy for years since.

A scandal erupted in 1968 when a bodyguard of his was found dead in a trash receptacle at his house! He’d been shot in the head. Though Delon was out of the country at the time, he was grilled by authorities and there were murmurings of a whole mess of activity that included crime, drugs and orgies amongst various high-level French people, most of which was never made public.

Borsalino, released in 1970, was a smash hit in Europe. It told the story of two petty crooks in 1930s Italy who progress to more substantial organized crime. Delon took second billing to Jean-Paul Belmondo and the film seemed to have a sort of Newman and Redford spin to it, according to some viewers.

Around this time, Delon began producing some of his own films. Eventually, he would also dabble in writing and directing. It seemed almost a certainty, in the comparably intimate world of French and Italian filmmaking that he would work with many of the same costars time and again, but he was also amiable enough to be asked to work with major American stars more than once as well. An example of this is the Charles Bronson western drama Red Sun, which also featured Toshiro Mifune and Ursula Andress as part of its international cast.

In 1973, Delon played the head of a mysterious clinic in Shock Treatment. The British title for the film was Doctor in the Nude, which proved to be aptly descriptive! In the movie, Delon and several of his patients take a naked swim in the ocean and he showed all.

That same year, he re-teamed with Burt Lancaster in Scorpio, a cat and mouse thriller about two spies attempting to do each other in. Delon worked steadily in European films, eventually, as a favor to his son who loved the character, taking part in a remake of Zorro. This version was set in South America and had a rather goofy approach (the theme song is one of the craziest things you’ll ever hear), but Stanley Baker provided a decent antagonist and there’s a great, lengthy sword fight in the end.

Delon won much praise for his work in the film Mr. Klein, about an ice-cold art dealer during WWII who exploits the desperation of Jews by buying and selling their belongings at a huge profit until he discovers that he is in danger of being confused with another Mr. Klein, a Jew.

The film that first brought Alain Delon to my attention is the dreadful The Concorde: Airport ’79. Playing the pilot of the title vessel, a duty he shares with George Kennedy, Delon was part of a large cast that mixed international names such as Sylvia Kristel and Bibi Andersson with veterans like Martha Raye, Mercedes McCambridge and Eddie Albert and then tossed in people such as Charo and Jimmie Walker! And that only scratches the surface of the actors involved.

Hopefully, he was well paid for the positively awful piece of junk. He would have come out mostly unscathed since, as a pilot, he wasn’t subjected to some of the more goofy storylines that others endured, but for the fact that he and Kristel have a love scene in which he is actually required to look at her and say, “Your hair is my French fries…” Even with that, he was better off than “jazz singer” Monica Lewis, fretful mother Cicely Tyson or shellacked reporter John Davidson whose hair stays put when the plane spins upside down.

In the years since this, his final English-speaking film if I’m not mistaken, he has continued to work in the occasional movie, but also has written, directed, produced and has also created a successful line of merchandise including sunglasses and fragrances. He won the Cesar, France's answer to The Oscar, in 1984 after having been nominated twice previously.

In his early years, he was thought of as a French James Dean and was also called a Male Bardot, though I almost think of him more as France’s answer to Paul Newman. He had a lengthy career, sometimes taking part in fluff, but more often trying to expand his range and deemphasize his extraordinary looks. Like Newman, he evolved into a lean and handsome silver-haired gentleman who won the respect of his peers.

Married twice, involved with countless beautiful women and the father of several children, he led a colorful life that included, by his own admission, sex with other men, giving him a certain mystique and allure on top of his physical attributes and acting talent. His work in American films is spotty at best, but his work at home is a legacy that many people will continue to treasure.