I can’t think of anything original to say about the late Maureen O’Hara, who passed earlier today at age 95. All I can summon are the usual cliches — she was tough and sharp, the original flame-haired Irish beauty, highly spirited, no pushover. Thank God for her collaborations with John Ford and John Wayne, right? Her career boiled down to nine movies — four made in her 1939 to ’52 peak period (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, How Green Was My Valley, Miracle on 34th Street, The Quiet Man) between the ages of 19 and 32, four made in her early-middle-aged period (Our Man in Havana, Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation, Spencer’s Mountain, McClintock!) between the ages of 39 to 43, and her swan song performance opposite John Candy in Only The Lonely (’91), when she was 70 or thereabouts. The rest were negligible or half-and-halfers. O’Hara was, of course, intensely attractive in the bloom of youth, especially in Hunchback (in which she played Esmeralda the gypsy) and How Green Was My Valley. In the mid ’80s an Irish girlfriend gave me a book called “The Joy of Irish Sex” — 150 blank pages. But I always had this fantasy that O’Hara was great in the sack. I remember being a bit disappointed when I read that O’Hara had proved she hadn’t been making out with some “Latin” guy in the rear section of Grauman’s Chinese, as a mid ’50s Confidential story had erroneously reported. I’m also sorry that she wore a body suit during the climactic scene in Lady Godiva of Coventry (’55). My ex-wife Maggie and I stayed at the Hotel Esmeralda when we got married in Paris in October ’87, and on some level I think I booked that hotel as a tribute to O’Hara.