Well, believe it or not, in August of this year, Maureen will celebrate her 90th birthday. Her legions of fans will wish her a very happy birthday and look forward to the day when she clocks up a hundred.
During her long career in the movie business, Maureen received many awards for her screen appearances and many of her films were truly memorable. There was "Jamaica Inn," "How Green Was My Valley," "The Parent Trap," "The Long Gray Line," "Miracle on 34th Street," "Only the Lonely," "Cab To Canada," and, of course, "The Quiet Man," just to mention a few.
But amazingly, Maureen was never even nominated for an Oscar, let alone stand on the podium to receive the prize her performances richly merited.
Maybe in those days there was a lot of politics in Hollywood and she just got squeezed out.
I am one of Maureen's biggest fans and live and work quite near her, in Cork City, a mere fifty miles from where she has made her Irish home in the truly lovely village of Glengarriff in West Cork.
I am chairman of the Quiet Man Fan Club (look it up on the web) and I got to thinking how we might honor Maureen on this special birthday, and it struck me that although a regular Academy Award is now probably beyond her reach, every year several Lifetime Achievement Oscars are awarded to people unlucky enough not to be honored first time round.
For example, in 2009, Lauren Bacall received such an award, and she was a very popular choice. After this I emailed the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles proposing Maureen O'Hara for a Lifetime Achievement Oscar for 2010. I received a gracious reply stating that my proposal would be considered.
I have launched a campaign for others to back my proposal and I urge all readers to email or write to the academy (its address is on its website) so that the sheer weight of numbers will bring this about.
"The Quiet Man" goes from strength to strength. In 2011, we will be celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of this remarkable movie based on the short story by Maurice Walsh, directed by the great John Ford, and shot on location in the West of Ireland.
And what a cast it had. As well as Maureen O'Hara, it had The Duke, John Wayne, whose people came from the Glens of Antrim and West Cork, Barry Fitzgerald, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, and a host of Irish stars and local extras. It was the first full-length feature film shot in color in Ireland and has done more for Irish tourism down the ears than can be calculated.
It is still shown frequently on television, especially, of course, on Saint Patrick's Day, and is a best-seller on video and DVD. A whole new generation of young people, many of them Irish American, are now discovering its delights for the first time.
I have written three full-length books on the movie, most recently "A Quiet Man Miscellany," published by Cork University Press. This book contains reams of new information on the movie, the letters of Ford's Girl Friday, Meta Sterne, the memoirs of Brooklyn's Maureen
Coyne-Cashman, the story of scriptwriter Richard Llewellyn, the background to the ecumenical antics in the movie, details of the first academic conference on the film held in Galway in 2005, and the opening of Pat Cohan's movie bar in Cong as a real pub after all the years. In addition, there are dozens of new photographs and stills from the film that have never seen the light of day before. The book has abundance of facts that will be new to even its most devoted fans.
Those fans, me among them, call ourselves the Quiet Maniacs. There are many millions of us around the globe. Our devotion to the movie is total. It is the greatest film ever made, bar none. We know every word of dialogue, every star and bit player, every location, every bit of music and every scene.
I myself have watched each of its 120,000 frames individually, and the movie in total over five hundred times. It is a very pleasant form of madness.
Des MacHale teaches at University College Cork and is chairman of the Quiet Man Movie Fan Club. He is author of "The Complete Guide to the Quiet Man" (Appletree Press 2000) and "Picture the Quiet Man" (Appletree Press 2004). His New book, "A Quiet Man Miscellany," is published by Cork University Press. Details on availability at www.corkuniversitypress.com. MacHale was born and grew up in County Mayo, just a few miles from where "The Quiet Man" was filmed.
