Margaret O'Brien

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Margaret O'Brien

from the trailer for Journey for Margaret (1942)

Born

Angela Maxine O'Brien
January 15, 1937 (age 71)
San Diego, California

Spouse(s)

Harold Allen, Jr. (1959-1968)
Roy Thorsen (1974-)

Awards won
Academy Awards
Academy Juvenile Award 1945 Outstanding child actress of 1944

Margaret O'Brien (born January 15, 1937 in San Diego, California) is an Academy Award-winning American film actress, and although her career was brief, was one of the most highly regarded child actors in cinema history.

Born Angela Maxine O'Brien, her father, a circus performer, died months after her birth; Margaret's mother, Gladys Flores, was a well-known flamenco dancer who often performed with her sister Marissa, also a dancer. Margaret is of half-Irish and half-Spanish ancestry.

She made her first film appearance in Babes on Broadway (1941) at the age of four, but it was the following year that her first major role brought her widespread attention. As a five-year-old in Journey for Margaret (1942), O'Brien won wide praise for her convincing acting style. By 1943, she was considered a big enough star to have a cameo appearance in the all-star military show finale of Thousands Cheer.

She played a young French girl, and spoke and sang all her dialogue with a French accent, in Jane Eyre (1944). Arguably her most memorable role was as "Tootie" in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), opposite Judy Garland. O'Brien had by this time added singing and dancing to her achievements and was rewarded with an Academy Juvenile Award the following year. Her other successes included The Canterville Ghost (1944), Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), and the first sound version of The Secret Garden (1949), but she was unable to make the transition to adult roles.

A 1946 Looney Tunes short, Book Revue, placed a caricature of O'Brien in the role of Little Red Riding Hood.

Margaret later shed her child star image in 1958 by appearing on the cover of Life Magazine with the caption "The Girl's Grown"'. O'Brien's acting roles as an adult have been few and far between, mostly in small independent films. However, she does do occasional interviews, mostly for the Turner Classic Movies cable network. She played the role of Betsy Stauffer, a small town nurse, in "The Incident of the Town in Terror" on television's Rawhide. Another rare television outing was as a guest star on the popular Marcus Welby, M.D. in the early 1970s, reuniting Margaret with her The Canterville Ghost co-star Robert Young.

She has been married twice, to Harold Allen, Jr. from 1959 to 1968, and later to Roy Thorsen. The later marriage produced her only child, Mara Tolene Thorsen, born in 1977. Margaret is that rare child star who did not wind up fighting off poverty and addictions in later life. All her memories of her child star days are happy ones, except for working with the difficult Wallace Beery, who would pinch her to the point where crew members would have to protect her.^{[citation needed]}

O'Brien has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Motion Pictures at 6608 Hollywood Boulevard, and for television at 1620 Vine St. In 2006, she was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the SunDeis Film Festival at Brandeis University.

[edit] Filmography

Year	Film	Role	Other notes
1941	Babes on Broadway	Maxine, Little Girl at Audition	uncredited
1942	Journey for Margaret	Margaret White
1943	You, John Jones!	Their daughter	short subject
	Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case	Margaret
	Thousands Cheer	Customer in Red Skelton Skit
	Madame Curie	Irene Curie (at age 5)
	Lost Angel	Alpha
1944	Jane Eyre	Adele Varens
	The Canterville Ghost	Lady Jessica de Canterville
	Meet Me in St. Louis	'Tootie' Smith
	Music for Millions	Mike
1945	Our Vines Have Tender Grapes	Selma Jacobson
1946	Bad Bascomb	Emmy
1946	Three Wise Fools	Sheila O'Monahan
1947	The Unfinished Dance	'Meg' Merlin
1948	Big City	Midge
1948	Tenth Avenue Angel	Flavia Mills
1949	Little Women	Beth March
1949	The Secret Garden	Mary Lennox
1951	Her First Romance	Betty Foster
1952	Futari no hitomi		Girls Hand in Hand US title
1956	Glory	Clarabel Tilbee
1960	Heller in Pink Tights	Della Southby
1965	Agente S 3 S operazione Uranio
1968	Annabel Lee
1974	Diabolique Wedding		aka Diabolic Wedding
1974	That's Entertainment!	Herself and archive footage
1981	Amy	Hazel Johnson	aka Amy on the Lips
1996	Sunset After Dark
1998	Creaturealm: From the Dead	Herself	segment Hollywood Mortuary
2000	Child Stars: Their Story	Herself	aka Child Stars
2002	Dead Season	Friendly Looking Lady
2004	The Mystery of Natalie Wood	Herself
2005	Boxes	Herself	short subject
2006	Store	Herself