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Happy Birthday, Maureen O'Hara!


Subdeacon Joe

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"That was real dung in 'The Quiet Man' (1952). He was the biggest devil, John Ford. He put as much of that dung in the field as he could, and then made sure that I was covered in it by the end of the day. Oh, I can still smell that awful stuff."
John Wayne and Ford decided to play a trick on Maureen O'Hara during filming. They chose the sequence where Wayne drags O'Hara across the town and through the fields. Before shooting the scene, Wayne and Ford kicked all of the sheep dung they could find onto the hill where O'Hara was to be dragged, face-down, on her stomach. She saw them doing it; with the help of several friends, she kicked it off, only to have Wayne and Ford kick it back on. She and her friends kicked it off again, and Wayne and Ford kicked it back. This went on and on until right before the scene was to be shot, when Wayne and Ford got in the last kick. According to O'Hara, "Duke had the time of his life dragging me through it. It was bloody awful. After the scene was over, Mr. Ford had given instructions that I was not to be brought a bucket of water or a towel. He made me keep it on for the rest of the day. I was mad as hell, but I had to laugh, too. Isn't showbiz glamorous?"
In the scene where Wayne discovers O'Hara in his cottage, the wind whipped her hair so ferociously around her face she kept squinting. Ford screamed at her in the strongest language to open her eyes. "What would a bald-headed son of a b!tch know about hair lashing across his eyeballs?" she shot back.
During the filming of a take of the scene where Wayne first kisses O'Hara, she slaps his face. When he blocked the blow, she broke a bone in her hand. Since the movie wasn't being filmed in sequential order, she couldn't wear a cast to fix the broken bone.
At the film's conclusion, after the credits, we see Kate and Sean standing in their garden waving good-bye. Maureen O'Hara turns to John Wayne and whispers something in his ear, evoking a priceless reaction from Wayne. What was said was known only to O'Hara, Wayne, and director John Ford. In exchange for saying this unscripted bit of text, O'Hara insisted that the exact line never be disclosed by any involved parties. In her memoirs, she says that she refused to say the line at first as she "couldn't possibly say that to Duke," but Ford insisted, claiming he needed a genuine shock reaction from Wayne. The line remains a mystery to this day. (IMDb)
Happy Birthday, Maureen O'Hara!
 
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One of my all time favorite actresses! One of my favorites was Comanche Territory where sang an Irish comical song. MacDonald Carey played Jim Bowie! Great movie!

Happy Birthday Maureen!:wub:

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I have that one in our DVD library.

I'll have to watch that one again.

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