Irish Hollywood star Maureen O'HaraSilver Screen Collection
A new book on Hollywood legend Maureen O’Hara claims the Irish actress lived a double life as she tried to protect her ‘bully of a husband’ Will Price.
The National Enquirer reports that the new book – 'Maureen O’Hara, The Biography' – presents O’Hara as a victim of her drunken and secretly gay second husband.
The book’s author Aubrey Malone claims that O’Hara was bullied and beaten by Price who blew her fortune.
The book says O’Hara lived a double life, pretending to fans that all was perfect with her second marriage.
The National Enquirer claims: “Malone rips the lid off ‘The Quiet Man’ beauty’s” life.
The books says that O’Hara, now 93, was already hiding a secret when she arrived in Hollywood at age 17 to fulfill a seven-year movie contract set up by actor-director Charles Laughton, her co-star in the 1939 classic ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame.'
She was tricked into marrying George Brown, a film production assistant, before she left for America. The report says the redhead described being in a surreal ‘out-of-body’ state when she said ‘I do’.
The book says O’Hara kept the never-consummated marriage secret and had it annulled in 1941 – after her marriage to Price, a dialogue director she’d met on the set of Hunchback.
The actress described Price as the perfect Irish suitor. She said: “I knew I had found a real friend. I had travelled halfway around the world to find the one man I could love.”
Malone claims the reality was entirely different and writes that Price was a brutal bully, boozer, gold digger and closet homosexual.
The book claims the actress was so desperate ‘to make things work…it blinded her to his demonic behaviour’.
Malone even claims that two months after their wedding she realized he was a drunk. In one incident, a hooker called O’Hara from a brothel, screaming for her to “pick the son of a *$!%& up and get him the hell out of here!”
Malone also claims that Price returned from Army service in the Second World War as a ‘mean and nasty man.'
The book says: “One night, he raged at pregnant Maureen about her antique doll collection, bellowing, ‘I hate them! Get them out of here!’
“When she refused, he smashed them and punched her in the belly, endangering their baby, daughter Bronwyn, born in 1945. Still, she kept silent because nights like this were too revolting to relate to the world or her family.”
The book also claims that Price blew O’Hara’s fortunes by 1951. In 1953, she divorced Price, whom she’d learned was secretly gay.
O’Hara finally found happiness with aviator Charles Blair whom she wed in 1968. He died in a plane crash a decade later.