44 Facts About Barbara Hershey

Barbara Hershey began acting at age 17 in 1965 but did not achieve widespread critical acclaim until the 1980s.

Barbara Hershey received Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ and for her role in The Portrait of a Lady.

Barbara Hershey has won two Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival for her roles in Shy People and A World Apart.

Barbara Hershey was featured in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, for which she was nominated for the British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress and Garry Marshall's melodrama Beaches, and she earned a second British Academy Film Award nomination for Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan.

Barbara Hershey's career suffered a decline during a six-year relationship with actor David Carradine, with whom she had a child.

Barbara Hershey experimented with a change in stage name to Barbara Seagull.

Barbara Hershey's acting career was not well established until she separated from Carradine and changed her stage name back to Hershey.

Barbara Hershey Herzstein was born in Hollywood, the daughter of Arnold Nathan Herzstein, a horse-racing columnist, and Melrose Herzstein.

Barbara Hershey's father's parents were Jewish emigrants from Hungary and Russia, while her mother, a native of Arkansas, was a Presbyterian of Scots-Irish descent.

The youngest of three children, Barbara Hershey always wanted to be an actress, and her family nicknamed her "Sarah Bernhardt".

Barbara Hershey was shy in school and so quiet that people thought she was deaf.

Barbara Hershey said that she found Field to be very supportive of her in her first acting role.

Barbara Hershey's acting debut, three episodes of Gidget, was followed by the short-lived television series The Monroes, which featured Michael Anderson, Jr.

In 1968, Barbara Hershey worked in the 1969 Glenn Ford Western Heaven with a Gun.

When she was offered a part opposite Timothy Bottoms in The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder, Barbara Hershey had to forfeit half her salary, $25,000, to be billed under the name "Seagull" because the producers were not in favor of the billing.

In 1970, Barbara Hershey played Tish Grey in The Baby Maker, a film that explored surrogate motherhood.

Barbara Hershey played, under the direction of Carradine, a love interest to his character, Kwai Chang Caine, during his time at the Shaolin temple.

Barbara Hershey appeared in two of Carradine's independent directorial projects, You and Me and Americana, both of which had been filmed in 1973.

Barbara Hershey publicly acknowledged the desire to be recognized in her own right.

Later in the decade, Barbara Hershey starred with Charlton Heston in The Last Hard Men.

Barbara Hershey hoped the film would revive her career after the damage she felt it had suffered while she was with Carradine, believing that the hippie label she had been given was a career impediment.

Barbara Hershey landed a role in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man, marking a return to the big screen after four years and earning her critical praise.

Barbara Hershey felt that she would be forever in debt to Rush for fighting with financiers to allow her a part in that film.

Barbara Hershey felt The Stunt Man was an important transition for her, from playing girls to playing women.

In 1986, Barbara Hershey left her native California and moved with her son to Manhattan.

Barbara Hershey followed Hannah and Her Sisters with back-to-back wins for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for Shy People and for her appearance as anti-apartheid activist Diana Roth in A World Apart.

Barbara Hershey played the love interest to Gene Hackman's character in the basketball film Hoosiers.

Barbara Cloud of the Pittsburgh Press gave attribution to Hershey for starting a trend when she had collagen injected into her lips for her role in Beaches.

Barbara Hershey looked like she stopped off at a gas station and someone said, 'Your lips are down 30 pounds.

In 1990, Barbara Hershey won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Special for her role as Candy Morrison in A Killing in a Small Town, which was based on Candy Montgomery's acquittal for the death of Betty Gore.

In preparation for the part, Barbara Hershey had a phone conversation with Montgomery.

Also in 1990, Barbara Hershey drew upon what Woody Allen once described as her "erotic overtones", portraying a woman who falls in love with her much younger nephew by marriage, played by Keanu Reeves, in the comedic Tune in Tomorrow.

In 1991, Barbara Hershey played Hanna Trout, the wife of the title character in Paris Trout, a made-for-cable television movie.

Later in the year, Barbara Hershey played an attorney defending her college roommate for the murder of her husband in the suspenseful whodunit Defenseless.

Barbara Hershey was nominated for a Golden Satellite Award for another TV appearance, The Staircase.

Barbara Hershey co-starred with Joe Pesci as a nightclub owner in the film drama The Public Eye and as the abused estranged wife of a homicidal Michael Douglas in the thriller Falling Down.

Barbara Hershey earned an Oscar nomination and won the Best Supporting Actress award from the National Society of Film Critics for her role as Madame Serena Merle in that picture.

In 1999, Barbara Hershey starred in an independent film called Drowning on Dry Land; during production she met co-star Naveen Andrews, with whom she began a romantic relationship that lasted until 2010.

Barbara Hershey was the only American in a mostly Australian cast, which included Kerry Armstrong, Anthony LaPaglia, and Geoffrey Rush.

Barbara Hershey has appeared on television during the 2000s, including a season on the series The Mountain.

Barbara Hershey appeared as an American actress, Mrs Hubbard, in an adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express for the British television series Poirot, which aired in the United States on Public Broadcast Service in July 2010.

Also in 2010, Barbara Hershey co-starred in Darren Aronofsky's acclaimed psychological thriller Black Swan opposite Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.

In 1968, Barbara Hershey met David Carradine while they were working on Heaven with a Gun.

On October 6,1972, Barbara Hershey gave birth to their son, Free, who changed his name to Tom when he was nine years old.