Barbara Hershey

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

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[edit] 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 horse-racing columnist, Hershey attended Hollywood High School. Her debut was guest starring in three episodes of Gidget in 1965, which she followed up by being cast 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. 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.Coral Kattner was her best friend.

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 typically 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.

In 1976, she starred alongside Charlton Heston in The Last Hard Men. 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 film The 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.

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. 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 Shy People and for A World Apart.

For her role in the 1988 Bette Midler melodrama Beaches, she injected collagen into her lips - an act that drew negative media coverage.[1]

In 1990, she won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Special for her turn as real-life murderer Candy Morrison in A Killing in a Small Town. Throughout the nineties, Hershey made more small independent films and television projects.

As Madame Merle in Jane Campion's 1996 adaptation of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, Hershey earned an Oscar nomination and won the Best Supporting Actress award from the National Society of Film Critics. In 1999, Hershey starred in Drowning on Dry Land with Naveen Andrews - with whom she entered into a romantic relationship. During a brief separation in 2005, Andrews fathered a child by another woman. He and Hershey have reportedly reconciled.

In 2001, Hershey was part of a largely Australian ensemble cast for the critically successful Australian film Lantana, which also starred Kerry Armstrong, Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush playing a troubled psychiatrist. She appeared in 11:14 in 2003.

Her most recent screen credit was in the 2004 Stephen King adaptation Riding the Bullet.

[edit] Awards

1996 - Nominee - Academy Awards - Best Supporting Actress - Portrait of a Lady

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Collagen smooths wrinkles and plumps your kisser

[edit] External link

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