We’ll Miss Them: Michael Stevens, Maureen O’Hara and Flip Saunders

We’re all part of one sort of community or another, and when a community suffers a loss, we share in that loss. This month, the world of entertainment and performing arts lost two members of high achievement, one who was born and Washington and, with his father, co-produced the Kennedy Center Honors since 2003 and numerous film documentaries. The other was a legendary movie star from Hollywood’s Golden Age. The world of professional sports—locally and nationally—lost one of its most respected members, too.

This month we lost Michael Stevens, part of a major film-making family which included his father, George Stevens, Jr., a Georgetown resident. We lost Maureen O’Hara, 95, a bright, shining star in Hollywood’s golden age from the 1930s, when she came to the states as a teenaged Abbey Theatre actress, onward. This past week, we lost Flip Saunders, whose loss was deeply felt here where he coached the Washington Wizards for over two years and guided its budding superstar John Wall.

MICHAEL STEVENS, 48

The life of Michael Stevens seemed to be a story of fathers and sons and fathers and sons, twice over. He seemed destined to be in the film business one way or another. His grandfather was George Stevens, one of Hollywood’s great directors, whose work began in the silent era and progressed to such hits as “Gunga Din,” in the 1940s, and in the 1950s, winning two Oscars (for “Giant” and “A Place in the Sun”) and being nominated for “Shane.”

George Stevens Jr. followed in his fathers footstep although in his own way—as a young man he worked on many of his fathers films, then founded the American Film Institute, made a documentary about his father, and directed his own films, including “The Murder of Mary Phagan.” He produced the Kennedy Center Honors since its beginning, then co-produced with his son Michael until last year, when the relationship with the Kennedy Center ended.

Michael Murrow Stevens was born in Washington, where Stevens and his wife Elizabeth had made their home in Georgetown. He attended the Landon School in Bethesda and graduated from Duke University with a degree in English literature and political science.

While Michael ventured out on his own to work on films like “The Thin Red Line” in 1998 and two tough crime thrillers, “Bad City Blues” in 1999 and “Sin” in 2003, he worked steadily as a producer, often with his father. He shared five prime-time Emmys on the KC Honors shows aired by CBS. He also helped produce the AFI lifetime salutes to film stars over the years, and directed a number of “Christmas in Washington” variety shows.

Like his father and grandfather, he ventured into documentaries and directed, co-produced and co-wrote the celebrated 2013 documentary on the much beloved and honored Washington Post political cartoonist Herblock, called “Herblock: The Black and the White.” He also directed and co-produced the 2011 film version of his father’s play “Thurgood” on the life of Thurgood Marshall.

It seems on the bright surface of their lives that here were three men, connected by a life lived not on film, but in film, in the arts, on stages and sets, bonded by respect, talent and love, often sharing their gifts and working together in ways that few fathers and sons have the opportunity to do.

MAUREEN O’HARA, 95

They don’t make them like that anymore.

They don’t make movies like the ones Hollywood made in its own-self-acknowledged golden age and they sure as all-get-out don’t make movie stars like Maureen O’Hara, who was one of the shining lights of that era that roughly spanned the beginning of talkies in the 1930s during the Depression through the 1950s, when the major studios and their heads at last began to lose their grip on power.

For an avidly movie-hungry public trying to make it through a Depression and the tensions of a World War, the studios created clowns, comedy, spectacles, epics musicals, swashbucklers, adaptations of classics, kid movies, westerns, cops and robbers and movies dealing with serious social movies, plus a fantasy or two.

They gave them movie stars as opposed to mere celebrities, and in a densely populated firmament of stars, few female stars shined brighter than the O’Hara whose Irish-lass abundant red hair just about blotted out the sun. She was made for Technicolor, which was just beginning when O’Hara arrived from Ireland as a teenaged actress straight out of the Abbey Theatre. She proceeded to star in a black and white version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” opposite Charles Laughton as Quasimodo, hopelessly smitten with O’Hara as Esmerelda, the gypsy girl. With medieval Paris as a setting and O’Hara’s drop-dead beauty, the movie looked as if it were shot in color.

She proceeded to star in a number of grade A films, in the 1940s—“How Green Was My Valley,” set in a Welsh mining town and directed by John Ford, the anti-Nazi “This Land Is Mine,” again with Laughton and other Ford films, in which she was sometimes paired with John Wayne, the greatest man’s man star outside of Clark Gable. All the Irish got together in Ford’s irascibly Irish cliché and fantasy, “The Quiet Man,” in which O’Hara and Wayne were a battling—literally—couple—Barry Fitzgerald was a tipsy matchmaker, Victor McLaglen played O’Hara’s brother, Ward Bond played a priest, and Ireland played Ireland, only more so, with the countryside intensely green and her hair intensely red.

O’Hara also starred in numerous films in a genre of film hardly, if ever, made anymore: the swashbuckler—especially those involving pirates and musketeers, in which she resisted and dueled with swains played by Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power and Cornel Wilde. The lass could handle a sword and wear a corset properly.

O’Hara hadn’t made a film in quite a while—her last was in 1991 playing John Candy’s mother and courted by Anthony Quinn.
O’Hara died on October 24, at her home in Boise, Idaho. She lives on and on, incandescent, on Turner Classic Movies.

FLIP SAUNDERS, 60

Flip Saunders, who was coach of the Washington Wizards for a short time, made it to several playoffs with other teams including the Minnesota Timberwolves.

He never won an NBA championship. All he ever won was the respect, affection, love of the players he coached, his fellow professionals in the coaching world, and the world of hoops, and his family. He won a host of friends.

Not everybody—even title winners—can say that.

The basketball world responded yesterday and today with an outpouring of tributes from players, coaches and probably basketball scribes after it was learned that Saunders had lost his fight with Hodgkins Lymphona at the age of 60. He had been coaching in a return gig with the Timberwolves, where he was director of basketball operations.

Randy Whitman, the Wizards’ current coach, said, according to reports, that Saunders should be celebrated as a great man who was able to do much for the game he loved and the people and players he worked with. Adam Silver, the NBA Commissioner, said that Saunders’ death had “left a gaping hole in the fabric of our league.” And John Wall, who was coached by Saunders when he began his career as a number one pick said that Saunders “taught me what it takes to be a good player and a better man.”