Barbara Hershey

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Date of Birth : Feb 5th 1948

Born Barbara Lynn Herzstein on February 5, 1948 in Hollywood, California to an Irish American mother and a Jewish American father who was a horse-racing columnist, Hershey attended Hollywood High School. Her debut was guest starring in three episodes of Gidget in 1965, which she followed up by being cast in the television series The Monroes (1966). 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 1972 Roger Corman production Boxcar Bertha, 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.

Her appearance in the 1981 horror film The Entity – where she played a woman repeatedly raped by an unseen supernatural force – sufficiently impressed Michael Douglas to have him later fight to have her cast as his estranged wife in Falling Down.