Amazing stories about The Quiet Man from Maureen O’Hara – Old western – My Blog

Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne may have produced several other movies together as the leading stars but it is The Quiet Man that will always stand out as the iconic duo’s crowning glory. In fact, it was the film’s director John Ford who first introduced the pair at one of his parties, in 1941.Of course, you can’t make a movie like The Quiet Man with such strong characters as Ford, O’Hara, and Wayne involved without creating tons of interesting stories from the set and from the production. In the documentary below, we hear from Maureen O’Hara herself, as well as The Duke’s son Patrick Wayne and Ford’s son (also named Patrick) about the ins and outs of filming The Quiet Man, how things were on set, and what it was like working with each other, especially with the temperamental Ford.


Ford liked people around who he was accustomed to, states O’Hara, which also meant that you were accustomed to him. Referring to it as who was “in the barrel” with Ford, on any given day you could fall victim to his abuse, something which the former “Queen of Technicolor” states you put up with because of the brilliance of his direction and because of the comradery it built on set in helping the person who was suffering from his wrath that day.Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne were great friends as well as co-starsOn the other hand, John Wayne was more than a pleasure for O’Hara to work with yet again, with Patrick Ford believing The Quiet Man to be the movie where The Duke truly showed off his acting chops.“They [Wayne and O’Hara] had the perfect professional relationship,” Ford states. “They understood each other as actors and they had tremendous respect for one another but never in any personal romantic way.”
“He loved me as a human being,” O’Hara says of her friend Wayne, recalling how he used to say, “She [O’Hara] makes me act because she makes me react.”