Same Name, Different Face: The Ladies M

Today's edition of Sam Name, Different Face is a real doozy, as it features four different actresses with similar names: Margaret O'Brien, Margaret Sullavan, Maureen O'Sullivan, and Maureen O'Hara. Complicating things further is the fact that none of them were extremely big stars -- O'Brien sort of was, as the era's second most popular child actor behind Shirley Temple, but even she never attained Temple-like icon status -- and none of them were stars much beyond 1965. They were, however, all marquee names at one time or another, and they were also all involved in multiple films that have stood the test of time -- more so, I would say, than the past Same Name, Different Face duo of Van Johnson and Van Heflin. My guess is that most people have seen at least one Maureen O'Hara film, regardless of whether or not they know who she is, and you don't have to delve very far into classic cinema before you run into the other three, and run into them many times over. The real problem is telling them apart, and thus, without further ado...Same Name, Different Face:

Margaret O'Brien

Margaret O'Brien was the World War II era's answer to Shirley Temple, after Temple had grown up and started playing teenage roles in films like Since You Went Away. Just as adult stars during the war years were made to seem more grounded than the glamorous stars of the Depression years, O'Brien was less cherubic than Temple and more identifiable to audiences as a "real girl": brunette and freckle-faced, her characters were less prone to sing and dance than to have crying jags, some warranted (as in Journey for Margaret) and some not (Meet Me in St. Louis, where she plays Judy Garland's bratty younger sister, Tootie). Like most kids, she had a slight speech impediment when she was younger that can occasionally make her seem overly precious, and I've always considered her character in Meet Me in St. Louis to be one of the most irritating put on screen ("You mean she accused her sister's boyfriend of assault and then admitted it was all a lie? OH THAT TOOTIE"), but she was undeniably a talented actress, and I'm surprised she didn't have much of a career after the forties, especially considering she was beautiful as an adult. Her last major role was in the 1949 version of The Secret Garden, although she continued to work in TV and frequently collaborates with TCM, being one of the few remaining stars from the studio system still alive and granting interviews.

Margaret Sullavan

Sullavan is perhaps the least well-known of the four women featured in this list, which is unfortunate, because for my money she's the best actress of the bunch and the one with the most unique persona, despite making only sixteen movies throughout her career. Like Vivien Leigh, she was primarily a stage actress who could be prickly about the Hollywood system, which explains her low film output, but also like Leigh, she had such a powerful screen presence that nearly every one of those sixteen roles is highly regarded. She wasn't particularly beautiful when compared with actresses like Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth, whose faces were so symmetrical that every photo of them turned into a glamour shot, but to say that she was plain isn't true, either: in motion, she was beautiful, with large expressive eyes that conveyed more than I've seen Turner or Hayworth give with their entire bodies. One of the most indelible images I've seen on film in the past few years is the shot of Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel after her character finds out her husband has been killed in the war, and she has to go on singing the patriotic anthem "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag, and Smile, Smile, Smile."

Eyes aside, most people would probably agree that Sullavan's most distinctive feature was her voice, which manages to be both husky and musical at the same time and really has to be heard to be understood. As much as I love classic movie actresses, I am the first to admit that they can be rather...shrill...at times, so whenever one comes along with a lower-register voice, she automatically seems to have a leg-up in being taken seriously (we still do this today, really -- think about Emma Stone versus a squeaker like Anna Faris). Of course, with Sullavan, she was also taken seriously because she was a good actress, and because she could play both comedy and drama, often within the same film, not by swinging from one extreme to the other but by existing somewhere in between at all times, more like people do in real life. Sullavan had that rare ability to connect with viewers on a human level, to break their hearts or make them laugh not through the overwhelming force of her acting but because everything she was feeling seemed to be real. Sullavan had a hard life -- she suffered from bouts of depression, became estranged from her children and began to go deaf at a very early age, all of which contributed to her apparent suicide in 1960 at the age of fifty -- but few actors have so spotless a film record, and it's not hard to separate her off screen troubles from the skill she evidences on screen.

Maureen O'Sullivan

In contrast to Margaret Sullavan, Maureen O'Sullivan was one of the most prolific actresses of the thirties, making 43 films between 1930 and 1939, eight of them in the year 1932 alone. Born in Ireland, she actually didn't have a strong Irish accent and played a number of American and British ingenue roles at the beginning of her career, the most famous of which is Jane Parker in the original Tarzan film, a role she reprised multiple times over the course of the next decade. She usually headlined smaller films while acting as a supporting player in bigger pictures, but because of the sheer number of films she made she was able to try her hand at just about every genre, and demonstrated a surprising deftness in just about all of them: adventure (Tarzan), drama (The Ballad of Bugle Ann), theatrical adaptations (Payment Deferred), literary adaptations (David Copperfield; Anna Karenina; Pride and Prejudice), horror (The Devil Doll), comedy (A Day at the Races), romantic comedy (Hold That Kiss), and westerns (The Tall T). She tends to get overlooked in discussions of great actresses because she never played a really stand-out, performance-heavy part, but she was always graceful and completely natural on screen; moreover, it may have been to her benefit that she never became a superstar, because she was able to take long breaks from film at various points in her career only to return and find work again. She was a devout Catholic and had seven children with director John Farrow, and one of her last roles was with her daughter Mia Farrow in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. She and Margaret Sullavan both rate as two of my favorite actresses of all time, and although I'd give Sullavan the edge in terms of acting ability, I can also say that I've genuinely enjoyed O'Sullivan in every movie I've seen her.

Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O'Hara is probably the most recognizable of this group today, both because of her bright red hair and her inclusion in multiple films that have remained popular with modern audiences: the original version of The Parent Trap, the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street, and John Wayne westerns like The Quiet Man and McLintock!  Like Maureen O'Sullivan, O'Hara was born in Ireland, but because of the color of her hair and her thicker accent, she was afforded a more eclectic range of roles than O'Sullivan, especially in westerns and adventure films like Black Swan. She was exquisitely beautiful and slightly younger than many of her contemporaries, and although I don't like the phrase "fiery redhead," that's really the best way to describe her persona: she played a lot of headstrong, passionate women, different from fellow redhead Rita Hayworth in that she wasn't also a femme fatale. Her characters, whether hailing from Ireland or the Old West, were rustic types, and her friendships with men like John Wayne and John Ford undoubtedly boosted her longevity, affording her a place in a genre that had room for female leads past the age of forty.