Maureen O'Hara O'Hara beat Lauren Bacall to the role as she was busy with other engagements. Though the film was critically acclaimed, Crowther of "The New York Times" felt that the characters of O'Hara and the daughter could have been made "more humorous and spirited than they are". The following year, O'Hara appeared in the CBS television film, "Mrs. Miniver", but despite some critics approving her performance, most thought that the remake was ill-timed and that she could not top Greer Garson's performance in the 1942 Oscar-winning film. In 1961, O'Hara portrayed Kit Tilden in the western "The Deadly Companions", Sam Peckinpah's
Mrs. Bridge The Believer, called "Mrs. Bridge" one of Connell's "three classics of Wasp repression" (the other two being the novels "Mr. Bridge" and "The Connoisseur"). American novelist James Patterson, who said "Mrs. Bridge" was the one novel that probably influenced him the most (Joshua Ferris is another admirer), said it and "Mr. Bridge" "capture the sadness, and boredom, of the unexamined life" and praises the compassion and precision of Connell's writing. British critic Matthew Dennison (who praised the "studiedly simple, undecorated prose, with few rhetorical flourishes") compared the main character to Jan Struther's Mrs. Miniver; both inhabit "an interwar world shaped