Maureen O'Hara - Marriage, Retirement and Comeback

Marriage, Retirement and Comeback

In 1939, at the age of 19, O'Hara secretly married Englishman George H. Brown, a film producer, production assistant and occasional scriptwriter whose best known work is the first of Margaret Rutherford's 1960s Miss Marple mysteries, Murder She Said. The marriage was annulled in 1941. Later that year, O'Hara married American film director William Houston Price (dialog director in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), but the union ended in 1953, reportedly as a result of his alcohol abuse. They had one child in 1944, a daughter named Bronwyn FitzSimons Price. Bronwyn has one son, Conor Beau FitzSimons, who was born on September 8, 1970. From 1953 until 1967 O'Hara had a relationship with Enrique Parra, a Mexican politician and banker. She wrote in her autobiography; "Enrique saved me from the darkness of an abusive marriage and brought me back into the warm light of life again. Leaving him was one of the most painful things I have ever had to do." She married her third husband, Charles F. Blair, Jr., on March 12, 1968. Blair was a pioneer of transatlantic aviation, a former Brigadier General of the U.S. Air Force, and a former Chief Pilot at Pan Am. A few years after her marriage to Blair, O'Hara for the most part retired from acting. Blair died in 1978 when an engine of a Grumman Goose he was flying from St. Croix to St. Thomas exploded. She was elected CEO and President of Antilles Airboats with the added distinction of being the first woman president of a scheduled airline in the U.S. Later she sold the airline with the permission of the shareholders. O'Hara remained retired from acting until 1991, when she starred in the film Only the Lonely, playing Rose Muldoon, the domineering mother of a Chicago cop played by John Candy. In the following years, she continued to work, starring in several made-for-TV movies, including The Christmas Box, Cab for Canada and The Last Dance, the latter her last film to date, released in 2000.

Now retired, she has homes in Arizona and the Virgin Islands but lived mainly in Glengarriff, County Cork after suffering a stroke in 2005. In June 2011 she participated at the Maureen O'Hara Film Festival in Glengarriff.

O'Hara made a public appearance in Kells Co. Meath on 26 May 2012 to commemorate her father, who was born in the town.

In May 2012, O'Hara's family contacted social workers regarding claims that O'Hara, who has short-term memory loss, was a victim of elder abuse. In September 2012 O'Hara flew to the US after being given permission to fly by a doctor, and is now living with her grandson, Conor Beau Fitzsimons, in Idaho.