page_title: Mary Maguire
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Maguire / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Actress Mary Maguire being welcomed home at Brisbane, 1936. Mary Maguire played the lead in 'The Flying Doctor'. She was contracted to Gaumont-British Films for two years in 1936. (Description supplied with photograph).
context_page_description: Mary Maguire was an Australian-born actress who briefly became a Hollywood and British film star in the late 1930s.
context_section_description: In mid 1939, she announced her engagement to Robert Gordon-Canning MC, a First World War veteran thirty years her senior. He had been active in far-right British politics, including the British Union of Fascists and The Link. When their engagement was announced, Maguire felt the need to publicly disassociate herself from Gordon-Canning's political views and anti-Semitism. In July 1939, she told a journalist from The Australian Women's Weekly: "I have no Fascist sympathies... and do not intend to take part in my fiancé's political life... I was given my big chance in Hollywood where there are many Jews. It would be both ungrateful and unkind of me to ally myself because of marriage with the Fascist Party." They married in August 1939, attracting great publicity, partly because she was carried to the wedding in an invalid chair, supposedly with a broken ankle. Several years later, she revealed that she had been suffering tuberculosis at the time of the wedding. Her sickness, which she characterized as "a wonky lung", was attributed to "exposure to inclement weather in Hollywood".
  Ironically, amongst his previous fascist publications, Gordon-Canning had written disparagingly of the influence and tone of Hollywood films. Although he was interned in July 1940, and she was still ill, a son, Michael Robert, was born in February 1941; he died in early 1942. Maguire's last film was This Was Paris, made in 1942 in England, a story of the activities of fifth columnists in Paris before its fall. She and Gordon-Canning divorced in 1944, and Maguire described the marriage as a "closed chapter" in her life. She attempted to restart her Hollywood career, but although still aged only 26, her efforts were to no avail.
  Her second marriage was to Philip Henry Legarra, a U.S. engineer, who had been sent to Britain to promote the Mustang fighter plane.
  She died at Long Beach, California, in 1974.
  In 2019, Michael Adams published a biography of Maguire, Australia's Sweetheart: The Amazing Story of Forgotten Hollywood Star Mary Maguire.
caption: Maguire being welcomed home at Brisbane, 1936
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