Barbara Hershey is an American film and television actress. She has twice won the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actress. While her initial popularity was in the sixties, she had a career revival during the eighties through which she did some of her best work.
Barbara Hershey was born under the name Barbara Lynn Herzstein in Hollywood, California on February 5, 1948. She first appeared on television at the age of 18 on the show "Gidget". She was also on an episode of "Daniel Boone", a hit show at the time, and spent some time on the cast of the sixties TV series "The Monroes", about a group of orphaned siblings trying to survive in the old west. She started making film appearances in movies such as "With Six You Get Eggroll", "Heaven with a Gun", and "Last Summer". During this period Barbara Hershey developed a reputation as a hippie / counter-cultural actress, temporarily changing her name to Barbara Seagull after an incident where a seagull was killed during filming, and naming her child with David Carradine "Free". Also during this period, she introduced a young Martin Scorsese to her favorite book, "The Last Temptation of Christ", which he would later cast her in his famous film adaptation of.
During the seventies, Barbara Hershey's career was slowed by the hippie image she had picked up over the years. It wasn't until her appearance in 1980's "The Stunt Man" that she started to increase in popularity again. The eighties found Barbara Hershey in a number of well received and highly visible roles in films such as Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" and Philip Kaufman's "The Right Stuff". It was during this period that she won two consecutive Cannes Film Festival Awards for Best Actress, for her appearances in the films "Shy People" and "A World Apart". She appeared in "The Last Temptation of Christ" as Mary Magdalene in 1988, and has continued to make frequent film appearances throughout the nineties and since the turn of the millennium.