With the passing of one of Hollywood’s truly legendary leading ladies, the HFPA’s Phil Berk remembers a one-of-a-kind icon. Maureen O’Hara gave her last HFPA press conference in June of 1991. She’d been away from the screen for 20 years but was enjoying a welcome comeback at 71 in John Hughes’ Only the Lonely. O’Hara died Saturday at 95. Like Gregory Peck, who too was under contract to 20th Century Fox during the 40s, she was happy to share a decade of Hollywood history with us.

Not surprisingly, she was still a beauty. When she walked into the room, you suddenly realized what an underrated actress she was. I remarked that she should have been nominated for an Oscar for The Quiet Man, and she smiled. Why I asked her, was she under contract to both RKO and Twentieth Century Fox at the same time? “Actually I signed that contract originally with Charles Laughton in 1939 when I made Jamaica Inn in London. It was for seven years. Then when Charles was signed to do The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the United States and he wanted me, his protégé, to play Esmeralda, naturally, to a man of such prestige they said ‘fine.’ After the success of that film, he sold my contract to RKO. “Then, when John Ford wanted me for How Green Was My Valley, 20th Century Fox insisted “no foreigners on the lot,” meaning non-contract people, so they bought me for one picture a year from RKO. Later Fox and RKO changed places, and Fox took over most of my contract. “Eventually what was left of that seven-year contract was sold to MCA and I ended up doing those Technicolor pictures at Universal.”

How did she originally get signed by Charles Laughton? “I was in the Abbey Theatre, and Harry Richmond, an old Vaudevillian came to Dublin, and he saw me. He was very, very drunk on Irish whiskey that night, but I must have made an impression because he went back to England and recommended me to the Elstree Studios. When they requested I come to London for a screen test, I didn’t want to go, but a very famous actress friend of my mother convinced us that we should. “For the test, they dressed me in a gold lamé gown to look like a golden-winged angel, and they put makeup on me that made me look like Mata Hari. They had me picking up a phone, putting it down, picking it up, putting it down. I thought, ‘Well God if this is what movies are, I don’t want to have anything to do with it.’

“Just before we left to go back to Dublin, we met Charles Laughton, who had known me from the Abbey Theatre. He asked if there was any film on me; then went to the studio in Elstree to see the test.” “As he tells it, he thought it was absolutely awful, but on the way back to London he could only remember my eyes, which convinced him, again in his words, that I was ‘the greatest thing that ever happened.’ “His offer for a seven-year contract arrived at our house in Dublin even before my mother and I got off the boat.” Although never known as a temperamental star, she was somewhat evasive when I asked her if she accepted everything offered her at Fox. “Well, when you were under a seven-year contract, if you didn’t do what you were told to do, you were put on suspension. You went off salary until you were replaced or until the movie was finished. That period of suspension was added on so that a seven-year contract could run ten or twelve years.”

Were there any parts she went after that she didn’t get? “Everyone at the studio wanted me to play Forever Amber. I was shooting Do You Love Me? at the time, and I received a telephone call that I was to go up to the head of the studio Darryl F. Zanuck’s office. There he informed me that I had the part but I was not to tell anyone. “I was so thrilled that when I went to lunch with another star who I thought was my best friend, I told her the good news, imploring her not to breathe a word.” “After lunch, Mr. Zanuck called me in. ‘I told you, you were not to discuss our meeting. You did, and now you’re off the picture.’ “Later on, when the director, who happened to be Gregory Ratoff, saw me sobbing on the set, he asked me why, and I told him the whole story. ‘You silly, stupid girl,’ he replied, ‘It was his mistress you spoke to.’ “But years later it was Darryl Zanuck who approved me for The King and I.”

She was also up for the role of Eliza in My Fair Lady. According to her, Columbia studio head Harry Cohn, one of her “dearest friends” and “a man she admired in spite of the nasty things said about him, 90 percent of them not true,” wanted to buy My Fair Lady for her. “If you sat down with Harry Cohn, he respected you. He was a wonderful man. I had many an agreement with him that was only a handshake, and he never broke one of them. “Anyway, he wanted me to do My Fair Lady, but Hecht-Lancaster started bidding against him, and it reached a point where the fee was too high so he had to step out.

Years later it went to Warner Bros.” What could she say about John Wayne? I asked her. “He was perhaps my best friend. He treated me just like another guy. He’d sit and talk to me about his problems and his lady friends and all sorts of things. You know the story, when somebody asked him, ‘What about O’Hara?’ he’d answer, ‘The greatest guy I ever knew.'” Why had she stayed away from the screen for so long? “My husband and John Wayne were great friends, and they decided it was time I stayed home. They thought they were going to get a big argument from me, but I answered, ‘Fine that’s okay with me, and I quit.” So, what made her return? “I liked the script, I liked the director, and I liked John Candy.”

Did she mind being known as the “Queen of Technicolor?” “They used strips of film, close-ups of me, to convince studios to use Technicolor, which I took as a nice compliment. I was proud of that, but I also realized that the great roles, the dramatic parts at the time, were being done in black and white, so I was banished to galloping around the desert on camels …” And how did she feel about those “awful” films now? “At the time, my brothers and sister used to call me Maureen Sahara and when I made a couple I wasn’t too fond of, they’d call me Maureen O’Horror, but those pictures all made a fortune.”

The Quiet Man is based on a famous short story. Why did Ford change the names of the characters? “There was almost always a Kate or a Mary in everything you did with Ford, out of respect, I think, for the two women he loved, Katharine Hepburn and Mary his wife. I know he loved Kate, and I think he was in love with Mary.” Did she miss Hollywood, she was asked at the end of the press conference. “Not at all. I have an absolutely wonderful life in the Virgin Islands.” She did, however, make three television movies after that. Sadly, she was never nominated for a Golden Globe.