Barbara Hershey: From a 1960s Young Actress to a Hollywood Standout
There are some actors whose careers seem to follow a predictable path. They find success in one type of role, become associated with a particular image, and remain there for decades.
Barbara Hershey took a very different route.
Her career has repeatedly crossed boundaries between television and cinema, commercial movies and challenging dramas, glamorous roles and psychologically demanding characters. That versatility is one reason she has remained such a fascinating presence in American film.
Her professional beginnings came during the 1960s. She was discovered while attending Hollywood High School and soon began working in television. One of her early credits was the television series The Monroes in 1966, establishing her presence at a remarkably young age. Her film debut followed in With Six You Get Eggroll in 1968. (IMDb)
From there, her career steadily expanded.
Finding her own identity
Hershey’s early years were spent taking on a variety of roles rather than immediately becoming locked into one screen persona.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, she appeared in films including Heaven with a Gun, Last Summer, The Baby Maker, The Pursuit of Happiness, and Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha. (Wikipedia)
These projects gave her an opportunity to demonstrate that she could handle dramatically different material.
That would become increasingly important as her career progressed.
By the beginning of the 1980s, Hershey had developed into an actress capable of moving between mainstream productions and more demanding dramatic work. Her performance as Nina Franklin in The Stunt Man in 1980 marked one of the important steps in that evolution. The American Film Institute lists Hershey among the film’s credited performers, confirming the role as part of her growing feature-film career. (AFI Catalog)
The Right Stuff and a new level of recognition
Three years later came The Right Stuff, one of the defining films of the 1980s.
The film dramatized the early years of the American space program and the test pilots who preceded the astronauts. Hershey played Glennis Yeager, wife of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager.
It was a significant role because the film combined large-scale historical storytelling with intimate personal moments. Hershey’s performance helped provide an emotional counterpoint to the technical and heroic aspects of the story.
Her credits soon continued to accumulate.
In 1984, she appeared in The Natural, alongside Robert Redford. Then came Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986, in which she played Lee. That same year she appeared in Hoosiers as Myra Fleener. (IMDb)
The sequence illustrates just how varied Hershey’s career had become.
She wasn’t simply appearing in one kind of movie.
The remarkable late-1980s run
The latter half of the 1980s was arguably one of the most impressive periods of Hershey’s career.
In 1987 she appeared in Tin Men and Shy People. Her work in Shy People was particularly important: she won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for the performance. She then won the same honor again the following year for A World Apart, making her the first actress to win the Cannes Best Actress award in consecutive years. (IMDb)
That achievement demonstrated that Hershey was no longer simply a familiar Hollywood face.
She was being recognized internationally as a serious dramatic performer.
Then came 1988.
Hershey appeared as Mary Magdalene in Scorsese’s controversial and ambitious The Last Temptation of Christ. She also starred as Hillary Whitney Essex in Beaches, a very different kind of movie that became widely remembered for its emotional story of friendship.
The AFI catalog confirms her roles in both films. (AFI Catalog)
That combination says a great deal about Hershey’s versatility. In the same period, she could work in a provocative religious drama directed by Martin Scorsese and then appear in an emotionally accessible mainstream film.
A career beyond glamour
Hershey’s screen presence has sometimes been described in terms of beauty, but reducing her career to appearance misses what made her distinctive.
She repeatedly sought roles with complicated emotional dimensions.
Her performances often involved characters who were intelligent, conflicted, vulnerable or difficult to categorize. That quality became increasingly obvious as she moved into the 1990s.
She earned an Academy Award nomination for The Portrait of a Lady in 1996, another indication of the critical respect she had accumulated. (IMDb)
She also continued working in television, demonstrating that she never regarded the medium as beneath her. Her television performances included A Killing in a Small Town and Paris Trout, among others. (IMDb)
And then came Black Swan
For a younger generation, one of Hershey’s most recognizable later performances came in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
Released in 2010, the psychological drama starred Natalie Portman as ballet dancer Nina Sayers. Hershey played Nina’s mother, Erica, a deeply complicated character whose intense relationship with her daughter becomes increasingly unsettling.
It was another striking transformation.
The actress who had started working in television in the 1960s was now appearing in a modern psychological thriller that became one of the most acclaimed films of its era.
Hershey’s performance fit perfectly into the film’s atmosphere of pressure, ambition and obsession. Her presence helped make Nina’s home life feel almost as psychologically claustrophobic as the ballet world surrounding her.
Her career credits confirm Black Swan as another major entry in an extraordinary filmography. (IMDb)
A career that resisted easy labels
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Barbara Hershey is how difficult she is to categorize.
She has worked with filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Jane Campion and Darren Aronofsky. Her filmography moves from Boxcar Bertha to The Stunt Man, from The Right Stuff to Hannah and Her Sisters, from The Last Temptation of Christ to Beaches, and eventually to Black Swan. (IMDb)
Those films could hardly be more different.
And yet Hershey found a place in all of them.
That is why a photograph from the beginning of her career is particularly interesting today. Looking at a young actress just starting out, it would have been impossible to know that she would eventually build such a varied body of work.
She wasn’t simply another promising face from 1960s Hollywood.
She became an actress whose career was defined by reinvention.
The answer
So, the answer to the quiz is Barbara Hershey.
The clues are unusually strong: her 1960s television beginnings, followed by The Stunt Man, The Right Stuff, Hannah and Her Sisters, Beaches, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Black Swan, form a near-perfect fingerprint of her career. (IMDb)
From a young performer beginning her career in the television world of the 1960s to a Cannes-winning actress and Oscar nominee, Hershey built a career on range rather than predictability.
And that may be the most fitting legacy of all: Barbara Hershey was never just one kind of Hollywood star.
