FIERY-HAIRED and feisty, Maureen O’Hara could handle anything the world and Hollywood threw at her. Director John Ford punched her in the jaw at a party and John Wayne dragged her through sheep dung — real sheep dung — in “The Quiet Man.” In “Miracle on 34th Street” she learned to believe in Santa Claus.

    But first and foremost, she always believed in herself.

    “I do like to get my own way,” she said in a 1991 interview. “There have been crushing disappointments. But when that happens, I say, ‘Find another hill to climb.’”

    The Irish-born beauty was 95 when she died Saturday in her sleep at her home in Boise, Idaho, said Johnny Nicoletti, her longtime manager.

    In her heyday, O’Hara was known as the Queen of Technicolor because of the camera’s love affair with her vivid hair, bright green eyes and pale complexion.

    But she also had talent.

    “I proved there was a bloody good actress in me,” she told the British newspaper The Telegraph last year. “It wasn’t just my face. I gave bloody good performances.”

    Never nominated for an Oscar (although she received an honorary Academy Award last year), O’Hara nonetheless starred in some of the best-known and beloved movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

    Whether playing a rancher’s wife, a pirate queen, or a mother, her characters were strong-willed women — a characteristic she practiced in real life as well and attributed to her Irish roots.

    She was the daughter of Welsh miner in the grim Oscar-winning 1941 film “How Green Was My Valley,” the mother who doubts her daughter, Natalie Wood, has really encountered Santa Claus in the 1947 Christmas classic “Miracle on 34th Street,” and a scrappy Irish colleen who is romanced by an American boxer (John Wayne) in 1952’s “The Quiet Man.”

    Wayne, who co-starred with her in five movies, once said, “I’ve had many friends, and I prefer the company of men, except for Maureen O’Hara; she’s a great guy.”

    “We met through Ford, and we hit it right off,” she remarked in 1991. “I adored him, and he loved me. But we were never sweethearts. Never, ever.”

    Her relationship with Ford was sometimes strained, especially when he had been drinking. O’Hara recalled that for some reason he punched her hard in the jaw at a party. For a prank, he and Wayne scattered real sheep dung over a field in Ireland where they were filming “The Quiet Man.”

    She sometimes called him a “devil” but acknowledged his talent. Maureen FitzSimons was born in 1920 near Dublin, Ireland.

    She was twice married in the 1940s and 1950s but they ended in annulment and divorce, although the second produced her daughter, Bronwyn. In 1968, she married her third husband, Brig. Gen. Charles Blair.

    (SD-Agencies)