Barbara Hershey

Barbara Hershey Bio

Barbara Lynn Herzstein, better known as Barbara Hershey, is an American actress whose career has spanned more than five decades across film and television. Born on February 5, 1948, in Los Angeles, California, she adopted the stage name Barbara Hershey in the 1960s and later briefly used the name Barbara Seagull during a well-publicized period of her personal life. She first gained attention in the television series The Monroes (1966) and in the controversial drama Last Summer (1969), before earning sustained critical acclaim in the 1980s with roles in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Shy People (1987), and A World Apart (1988). Over the years she has won two Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival, an Emmy, and a Golden Globe, and she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for The Portrait of a Lady (1996).

Early Life and Background

Barbara Lynn Herzstein was born in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, on February 5, 1948, the daughter of Arnold Nathan Herzstein, a horse-racing columnist, and Melrose Herzstein. Her father was the child of Jewish emigrants from Hungary and Russia, while her mother was a native of Arkansas of Scots-Irish descent. The youngest of three children, Barbara was a shy student whose family nicknamed her Sarah Bernhardt, reflecting her early dream of becoming an actress.

By the age of ten she had proven herself an excellent student. Her high-school drama coach helped her find an agent, and in 1965, at age seventeen, she landed her first role on the television series Gidget, starring Sally Field. Sources differ on whether she graduated from Hollywood High School in 1966 or left to pursue acting, but she was still a teenager when she began working professionally in Hollywood.

Path to Acting

After two episodes of Gidget, Hershey was cast in the short-lived western series The Monroes (1966), which also featured Michael Anderson Jr. The role marked her first extended television commitment and helped establish her as a working actress. While on the series, she earned additional small parts, including a role in Doris Day’s final feature film, With Six You Get Eggroll.

In 1968 she filmed Heaven with a Gun, a western starring Glenn Ford, on whose set she began her long relationship with actor David Carradine. The same year she appeared in Last Summer, a controversial drama directed by Frank Perry in which she played Sandy, a character whose actions influence two young men to commit a violent act. The performance drew strong notice and helped set the course of her serious dramatic work.

Barbara Hershey Career

Early Career (1965–1979)

Hershey built her early reputation with a mix of television and film roles throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1970 she appeared in The Baby Maker, a drama about surrogate motherhood, and in 1972 she starred as the title character in Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha, a period crime drama produced by Roger Corman. She once described Boxcar Bertha as the most fun she ever had on a movie, and the role helped cement her image as a fearless performer.

During this period she also experimented with the stage name Barbara Seagull and later won a gold medal at the Atlanta Film Festival in 1974 for the Dutch-produced film Love Comes Quietly. After ending her relationship with Carradine in the mid-1970s, she dropped the Seagull name and returned to billing as Barbara Hershey, refocusing her career on more substantial roles.

Breakthrough (1980–1989)

Hershey’s return to the big screen came with Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man (1980), a dark comedy that earned her widespread critical praise. She followed it with notable performances in the horror film The Entity (1982), Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), and Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1984), in which she played Harriet Bird opposite Robert Redford. These roles marked her transition from playing younger characters to playing complex women.

Her most celebrated work of the decade began with Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), directed by Woody Allen, which earned her a British Academy Film Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She then won the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival two years in a row, for Shy People (1987) and for A World Apart (1988), in which she portrayed anti-apartheid activist Diana Roth, a character based on Ruth First. She also co-starred with Bette Midler in Beaches (1988) and with Gene Hackman in the basketball drama Hoosiers (1986).

Notable Works and Milestones

Across the 1980s Hershey built a reputation as one of America’s most respected dramatic actresses. Her back-to-back Cannes wins, her BAFTA nomination for Hannah and Her Sisters, and her collaboration with Scorsese on The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), in which she played Mary Magdalene, cemented her standing in the industry. By the end of the decade the Chicago Tribune was referring to her as one of America’s finest actresses.

Barbara Hershey Award Nominations

Barbara Hershey has earned recognition from many of the entertainment industry’s most respected awarding bodies across her long career. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and she received Golden Globe nominations for her performances in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996). She was also nominated for the British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress twice, first for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and later for Black Swan (2010). Additional nominations include a Golden Satellite Award for The Staircase (1998) and a number of Primetime Emmy nominations for her television work.

Barbara Hershey Awards Won

Hershey has won several major awards over the course of her career. She received the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in both 1987 and 1988, for Shy People and A World Apart, respectively. In 1990 she won both the Primetime Emmy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie for her portrayal of Candy Montgomery in A Killing in a Small Town. She also won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and a gold medal at the Atlanta Film Festival for Love Comes Quietly (1974).

Barbara Hershey Family

Barbara Hershey is the daughter of Arnold Nathan Herzstein, a horse-racing columnist, and Melrose Herzstein. She grew up in Hollywood as the youngest of three children and was raised alongside her siblings in a household shaped by her father’s reporting work and her family’s mixed Hungarian, Russian, and Scots-Irish roots.

From her long relationship with actor David Carradine, she has one son, born Free Carradine in 1972, who later changed his name to Tom Carradine when he was nine years old. She also has one grandchild through her son.

Personal Life

Hershey began a high-profile domestic relationship with actor David Carradine in 1968 after they met on the set of Heaven with a Gun, and the couple remained together until 1975. Their relationship and her decision to breast-feed her son on national television drew heavy tabloid attention during the 1970s, a period in which she briefly adopted the stage name Barbara Seagull. After the relationship ended, she reverted to the name Hershey and rebuilt her career.

On August 8, 1992, she married artist Stephen Douglas at her home in Oxford, Connecticut, in a small ceremony attended only by their mothers and her son. The couple separated and divorced in 1993. She later began a relationship with actor Naveen Andrews in 1999 that lasted until 2010, when the couple announced they had ended their ten-year partnership.