Barbara Hershey (born 5 February 1948) is an American actress, known for her many film roles.

Personal life

Hershey was born Barbara Lynn Herzstein in Hollywood California, the daughter of Arnold Nathan Herzstein, a horse racing columnist and occasional actor. Her father was Jewish and her mother was an Arkansas-born Presbyterian of Irish descent. Hershey attended Hollywood High School. She lived with actor David Carradine between 1969 and 1975, and was married to Stephen Douglas, an artist, between 1992 and 1993. Hershey and Carradine were a prominent symbol of the Hollywood counterculture,Fact: date=June 2008 becoming parents to a child whom they named Free (who later changed his name to Tom). Hershey is dating actor Naveen Andrews; during a brief separation in 2005, Andrews fathered a child by another woman. He and Hershey have reconciled.

Career

Hershey's acting debut came in three episodes of Gidget in 1965, which she followed up by being cast in the television series The Monroes (1966), along with Michael Anderson, Jr.. She found working on The Monroes such a dispiriting experience that she wrote pseudonymous letters to the producers asking that the show be cancelled. In 1967, she also made a guest appearance on the hit Fess Parker NBC western series Daniel Boone in an episode titled "The Kings Shilling."

Hershey's feature film debut was in the 1968 comedy With Six You Get Eggroll which 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.

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 Frank Perry. The film received an X rating for a graphic rape scene and earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for co-star Catherine 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 professionally in the early 1970s as a tribute to the creature.

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 Roger Corman production Boxcar Bertha (1972), 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.