Sure, And I Hope It's a Happy One

Facebook Share Button Code Today, legendary actress Maureen O'Hara turns 90. Ms. O'Hara lives in retirement in her native Ireland (she also spends time in Arizona and the Virgin Islands). Over the course of her career, she held her own (and more) on the screen opposite John Wayne, Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Tyrone Power, among others, as they buckled their swashes and tamed the Wild West. She and Wayne worked together five times during their long careers. O'Hara was also a favorite of director John Ford and had little problem standing up to his well-documented temper and tyranny.

O'Hara also starred in several calmer pictures, carrying heavy dramatic loads right alongside her tuck-up-the-skirts-and-have-at-thee-knave roles. She recorded two albums, sang in several appearances on variety TV shows in the 1950s and early 1960s and was on Broadway in the 1960 play Christine.

In Against All Flags and At Sword's Point, she predated Lucy Lawless's warrior woman Xena by several decades, clashing steel with the fellows and making several of them sorry. She led the casts of several Westerns and similar films which featured tough gals in charge of things in a man's world. She later followed that up in real life by taking over as president of Antilles Airboats, a small commuter airline, when her husband, its CEO, died in a plane crash in 1978. This made her the first woman president of a scheduled airline in the United States -- tantrum-throwing former Jet Blue employee Steven Slater might have thought twice about sliding down the emergency exit if he'd seen the woman who'd stared down the Duke waiting for him at the bottom.

And I would love to watch what happened if someone had come to her in her prime and suggested a role in one of today's soggy, soppy chick flicks. I believe it might be something like tuck up the skirts and "Have at thee, knave!"