Product Description

In an acting career of more than seventy years, Hollywood legend Maureen O'Hara came to be known as "the queen of Technicolor" for her fiery red hair and piercing green eyes. She had a reputation as a fiercely independent thinker and champion of causes, particularly those of her beloved homeland, Ireland. In 'Tis Herself, O'Hara recounts her extraordinary life and proves to be just as strong, sharp, and captivating as any character she played on-screen.

O'Hara was brought to Hollywood as a teenager in 1939 by the great Charles Laughton, to whom she was under contract, to costar with him in the classic film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She has appeared in many other classics, including How Green Was My Valley, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and Miracle on 34th Street. She recalls intimate memories of working with the actors and directors of Hollywood's Golden Age, including Laughton, Alfred Hitchcock, Tyrone Power, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, and John Candy. With characteristic frankness, she describes her tense relationship with the mercurial director John Ford, with whom she made five films, and her close lifelong friendship with her frequent costar John Wayne. Successful in her career, O'Hara was less lucky in love until she met aviation pioneer Brigadier General Charles F. Blair, the great love of her life, who died in a mysterious plane crash ten years after their marriage.

Candid and revealing, 'Tis Herself is an autobiography as witty and spirited as its author.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94213 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Film legend O'Hara (b. 1920) and her collaborator, Nicoletti, have assembled a delightful anecdotal autobiography. She calls it "the tale of the toughest Irish lass who ever took on Hollywood and became a major leading lady of the silver screen." Born in a Dublin suburb, Maureen FitzSimons was a child radio actress, joined the Abbey Theater at age 14 and was cast in two major films before she was 19. After Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) came The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), launching her career of 60 films. Many were top productions, yet O'Hara never received an Oscar nomination: "Hollywood would never allow my talent to triumph over my face." She recalls highlights and hurdles, including confrontations with stars and directors, commenting, "I have acted, punched, swashbuckled, and shot my way through an absurdly masculine profession during the most extraordinary of times." With her hazel-green eyes and red hair, O'Hara was dubbed "Queen of Technicolor," but yearned for more than "decorative roles." During her lengthy friendships with John Wayne and director John Ford, she saw "the darker side of John Ford, the mean and abusive side." In concluding chapters, she writes about her TV appearances as a vocalist, the mysteries surrounding the death of her husband, Brig. Gen. Charles F. Blair and her life in the Virgin Islands, where she ran an airline (Antilles Air Boats) and became publisher of Virgin Islander magazine. Hollywood's heyday returns to life in this revealing, insightful memoir. O'Hara treats readers like close friends, and her powerful personality is evident throughout. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

The true leading lady has been gone from movie screens long enough that we can now ask ourselves if we miss her. So let's start by seeing how much we've missed Maureen O'Hara, a case study in second billing -- an immaculately lovely actress who could be tough or yielding as the occasion required but who was rarely required to carry the occasion. She was instead carried (sometimes literally) by square-jawed, square-framed leading men (John Wayne, most often) who could admire her pluck and sass without ceding any male prerogative. Maureen O'Hara was the woman who said she wouldn't be waiting when they got back -- and always was.

So let's put O'Hara front and center for a change, and let's pick her up when she's still Maureen FitzSimons, an ambitious young Dublin girl from a proud, attention-hungry family. The lassie is all set to embark on a career with the Abbey Theatre when the movies come calling, in the portly form of Charles Laughton. He can't stand her screen test, but he's taken by her dauntless hazel-green eyes, and so, still in her teens, she becomes his co-star in "Jamaica Inn" (1938), and then she's Esmeralda to his Quasimodo, and he's all set to cast her in another film when the war intervenes.

Marooned in Hollywood, she takes whatever flotsam comes her way, and before long, another man comes to her rescue: the irascible and already legendary director John Ford. He's an almighty mess and a self-proclaimed Irish republican, but he drops her into the sentimentalized Wales of "How Green Was My Valley," and, soon enough, she's helping him enact masculine myths of the West ("Rio Grande") and the U.S. Army ("The Long Gray Line") and, of course, Ireland ("The Quiet Man"). And even when he's brutalizing her on and off the set, she's careful not to protest too much. Or maybe it's just because she's too eaten alive by that husband of hers, the alcoholic nut job who lives off her and cheats on her and punches her in the stomach when she's pregnant with his child. But she gets a divorce and a new lover, and then, just as her career is tapering off, she finds marital bliss with Charlie Blair, an aviation pioneer who gets himself killed in a plane crash that is never satisfactorily explained. And then her best friend, John Wayne, dies, and what is there to live for? But she keeps on going because, by heaven, she's "a tough Irishwoman" who's never lost her faith in God and never will.

It's a movie, all right, but is it a book? Maybe, but not this book. 'Tis Herself is everything you'd expect from a film-star memoir, and less: clock-punch prose, self-serving anecdotes, absurdly perfunctory allusions to world events ("Vietnam was over. Watergate had come and gone, and a gentle peanut farmer was poised to become president") and liberal heapings of dirt on the safely dead. If anything, the gossip in 'Tis Herself, coming from someone who prides herself on her piety, has a more rancid aftertaste than usual. O'Hara reminds you of that angel-faced Catholic schoolgirl in the back row who waits for Sister's head to turn and then shanghais the nearest ear. (Lana Turner lied about her age! Peter Lawford and Richard Boone got caught in a male brothel!)

Amid all this settling of scores and posing for statues, a reader's only recourse is to pick up the threads that the memoirist, in her haste, has dropped. And so we note the curious way in which O'Hara's life and career have overlapped with gay or bisexual men: Laughton, to begin with; and second husband Will Price, who in addition to being a wife-beating lush, reportedly dabbled with men; and in the one plot twist that took me by surprise, John Ford, who is caught by O'Hara in a major liplock with "one of the most famous leading men in the picture business." (Oh, wouldn't you like to know? So would I.)

Ford's lowering presence nicely illustrates the book's other unspoken theme: the degree to which O'Hara, a self-styled man's woman, let herself be man's punching bag. She was, by her own account, coerced into marrying Husband No. 1, coerced out of her money by Husband No. 2 and coerced by Husband No. 3 into giving up her career. And in between husbands, there was always "Pappy" Ford, a labyrinth of "secrecy, lies, and aggression" who sent her mash notes and undermined her career, made nice with her family and humiliated her in public, treated her as a muse and then sicced law enforcement on her. Ever the good battered wife, she excuses his malice as a perverted form of love and coos to his departed spirit: "I love you too, Pappy." This recurrent pattern of submission sits bizarrely on a woman who insists she "always gave as good as I got" and was "only on her knees before God."

But the same dichotomies play out in her films. For all the beauty of her complexion and the purity of her John Singer Sargent profile, she was reduced, time after time, to the shrew waiting to be tamed. And tamed she was: defanged by Errol Flynn in "Against All Flags," publicly spanked by John Wayne in "McLintock!" (with a hand shovel), hauled by Wayne from glen to glen in "The Quiet Man" (rupturing one of her disks in the process). Did it ever occur to her, while her good friend Duke was dragging her facedown through a field of sheep dung and good Pappy Ford was looking on with an approving smile, that there was a cost to being a man's woman, that being a leading lady doesn't necessarily lead anywhere? If it crossed her mind, she's not telling.

Reviewed by Louis Bayard

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
John Wayne called her the "greatest guy he ever knew." She matched wits with Errol Flynn and traded barbs with Rex Harrison. Now 83, O'Hara looks back on her lengthy and legendary career in a captivating chronicle of Hollywood's heyday. O'Hara was known for her shimmering red hair and smoldering green eyes, and by looks and talents coincided with the advent of Technicolor movies, yet from Rio Grande to The Quiet Man, the roles she played on screen often mirrored her off-stage persona: tough, courageous women trying to survive in, as she puts it, an "absurdly masculine" world. Highly principled and high-spirited, O'Hara would go toe-to-toe with the tabloids and knock heads with studio brass. Throughout it all, she remained a woman of both physical and moral strength and integrity. In an open and sincere look back at a tumultuous career that spanned more than six decades, from London's Abbey Theatre to the Great White Way, O'Hara tells her own story as only she can: honestly, frankly, and unapologetically. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Loved this book!!!
I've always liked Maureen O'Hara, especially in 'The Quiet Man', and it was great fun to read about her personal life, and her thoughts about what was going on behind the scenes in the different movies I have watched so many times. The chapter on her comments about the making of 'The Quiet Man' and about her friendship with John Wayne were my favorite part. Her writing showed her weaknesses and mistakes made in her life in a balanced way that made me like her all the more. If you like Maureen O'Hara at all, you will not be disappointed in this book!

The harpies are alive and well in Maureen O'Hara
Walt Disney's last dying gasp was to call Maureen the B word. Uh-huh. Riiight. That's all he had on his mind. That's what consumed his soul as he bid this world goodbye, his venom for Maureen O'Hara. Walt couldn't stand Maureen because Walt had wanted to give Hayley Mills top billing for The Parent Trap. Not (mind you) because little Hayley deserved it and ought to have been recognized. Oh no. Rather Walt the Schemer, Walt the Destroyer was intent upon keeping Maureen down by listing her name after Hayley's. Maureen had to stand up for herself. Maureen had to stand strong. Maureen insisted her name be listed first and Walt never, ever forgave her for gaining the upper hand in that situation. So, on his dying bed, his last concern was to call her a nasty word. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. This lady hates a whole lot of people.

Read it, even though it isn't pretty.
The content of the book is not unusual. The same things happened to many female movie stars. They married husbands who were drunks, who physically beat them, psychologically tortured them, stole all their money, whored around, and refused to work. Movie queens were preyed upon by a certain type of man. You can read the same stories over and over again in the lives of Lana Turner (whose abusive lover was stabbed to death by her teenage daughter in her bedroom), Judy Garland whose husband used to slap her across the face in restaurants, Hedy Lamarr whose husband wanted to tie her up and burn her with cigarettes, Lucille Ball whose husband was an alcoholic addicted to sex with other women, Bette Davis who was beaten "many many times" by 4 husbands. Many of these actresses stayed for considerable amounts of time with these abusive husbands, putting up with it, and hoping for change, just as millions of women do who are not actresses.

What happened to Maureen is nothing compared to what Doris Day reveals in her autobiography.

From the way Maureen has written this book I take it that she used this autobiography to release all the resentment and anger at people who she feels betreayed her or abused her over her lifetime. Near the begining of the book, she writes "Allow me just a smidgeon of lattitude here. I've waited seventy years for this!" And then POW! A lifetime of rage comes pouring out. It's powerful stuff, and not easy to read.

Repeatedly Maureen writes that what she was doing, and what was being done to her, was confusing. Her life was full of contradictions, some of which she has no answer or explaination for. The book is certainly thought provoking.