TCM Star of the Month July 2014: Maureen O'Hara

We've already reached the first day of a new month, and this time, it's also the first of five nights given over to a new Star of the Month on TCM: Maureen O'Hara. O'Hara might be best remembered for the westerns she made with John Ford and John Wayne, and indeed there's an interesting Word of Mouth piece that TCM runs from time to time featuring O'Hara talking about her experiences with the two of them. They were making another movie together, and one night Ford and Wayne got drunk enough that Wayne was in no condition to drive. So Ford told O'Hara to drive Wayne home, and along the way, Wayne made O'Hara stop at the house of some complete strangers, where he pounded on the door and got the residents to fix him a drink!

None of O'Hara's movies with Wayne are on tonight's schedule. Instead, it starts off at 8:00 PM with the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which O'Hara plays Esmeralda opposite Charles Laughton's Quasimodo.

That's followed at 10:15 PM by How Green Was My Valley, in which O'Hara plays the adult daughter in a Welsh family where the only work around for the men is going down in the coal mines.

Sentimental Journey is up third at 12:30 AM; this one has O'Hara as a terminally ill actress trying to adopt a child for her husband so he won't be alone after she dies. You'd think the adoption agencies would reject such a request outright.

Then at 2:15 AM is The Forbidden Street which I think is a TCM premiere; in this Victorian-era drama O'Hara plays a woman from a reasonably well-to-do family who marries down and finds tragedy.