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Barbara Hershey

Barbara Hershey has built a screen career that resists easy categorization, moving between film and television, intimate drama, comedy, thrillers and horror without settling into one fixed type. Born Barbara Lynn Herzstein in Hollywood on February 5, 1948, she wanted to act from childhood, despite being so quiet at school that people reportedly thought she was deaf. A high-school drama coach helped her find an agent, and at 17 she made her acting debut in two episodes of Gidget before joining the television series The Monroes. By then, she had adopted the name Barbara Hershey. Her early film work included Last Summer, The Baby Maker and Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha. After several years split between features and television, Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man became an important transition in how Hershey saw her own career: a move from playing girls to playing women. The roles that followed showed how much territory she could cover, from The Entity and The Right Stuff to The Natural, Hoosiers and Tin Men. The second half of the 1980s brought some of her most recognized work. She played Lee in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, earning a BAFTA nomination, and won consecutive Best Actress honors at the Cannes Film Festival for Shy People and A World Apart. She reunited with Scorsese for The Last Temptation of Christ, playing Mary Magdalene, and appeared opposite Bette Midler in Beaches. Hershey continued to move easily between theatrical films and substantial television roles. She won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for A Killing in a Small Town, then received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Madame Serena Merle in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady. Later work has included Lantana, Black Swan and Insidious, along with recurring appearances as Cora, the Queen of Hearts, in Once Upon a Time. More recent films such as The Manor and 9 Bullets extend a career shaped less by a single defining role than by a willingness to keep changing tone, genre and scale.