Actors - Barbara Hershey

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Barbara Hershey

	Actors - Barbara Hershey

Barbara Hershey is an American actress, known for her many film roles.

Biography

Born Barbara Lynn Herzstein on February 5, 1948 in Hollywood, California to an Irish American mother and a Jewish American father who was a professional gambler, Hershey attended Hollywood High School. Her debut was guest starring in three episodes of Gidget in 1965, which she followed up with roles in the television series The Monroes (1966). She found working on The Monroes to be such a dispiriting experience that she wrote pseudonymous letters to the producers asking that the show be cancelled.

Her feature film debut was in the 1968 comedy With Six You Get Eggroll
- which also marked Doris Day's final screen appearance. This was followed by the 1969 Glenn Ford western Heaven with a Gun, where one of her co-stars was future Kung Fu star David Carradine. They became a romantic couple and a prominent symbol of the Hollywood counterculture - naming their child Free. (He later chose the name Tom for himself).

Later that year came the drama Last Summer
, based on the novel by Evan Hunter (better known for his police procedurals written under the pseudonym Ed McBain) and directed by future Mommie Dearest
helmsman Frank Perry. The film received an X rating for a graphic rape scene and earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for co-star Cathy Burns.

Hershey's performance as a manipulative queen bee made a large impression on Woody Allen, who would later foster her mid-80s career revival by casting her in his greatest commercial success Hannah and Her Sisters
. During the filming of a scene for Last Summer, a seagull was killed. Hershey felt a sense of personal responsibility for its death and went by the name of Barbara Seagull for several years in the early 1970s as a tribute to the creature.

Her 1970 film The Baby Maker explored the idea of surrogate motherhood many years before it became a mainstream reproductive option and reinforced her image as a free-spirited hippie.

This image helped secure her the starring role in the 1972 Roger Corman production Boxcar Bertha
, which was being directed on a typical low Corman budget by a fresh-out-of-film-school Martin Scorsese. During filming, Hershey gave Scorsese a copy of her favorite book - Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ
. Adapting that book into a film would become a 16 year labor of love for Scorsese, who would eventually cast Hershey as Mary Magdalene - though not before making her audition, to prove that she had earned it. Hershey's co-star in Boxcar Bertha was once again David Carradine. They would later recreate their love scene in a hay-filled boxcar for a Playboy magazine pictorial.

However, the hippie label soon became a career impediment and by the late 1970s she was appearing in made-for-TV movies like Flood! and Sunshine Christmas. But her work in Richard Rush's 1980 critical favorite The Stunt Man
- her first big screen appearance in four years - began a gradual career renaissance.

Her appearance in the 1981 horror filmThe Entity
- where she played a woman repeatedly raped by an unseen supernatural force - sufficiently impressed Michael Douglas to have him later fight to have her cast as his estranged wife in Falling Down
.

She gained increased visibility with performance as Glennis Yeager, wife of test pilot Chuck Yeager, in Philip Kaufman's 1983 film, The Right Stuff
. In mid-decade, she followed the commercial success of Hannah and Her Sisters with unprecedented back-to-back wins for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for "Hannah" and for Martin Scorsese's long-awaited and controversial The Last Temptation of Christ.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Barbara Hershey ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Barbara Hershey; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay