Barbara Hershey - Career - 1970s

1970s

In 1970 Hershey played Tish Grey in The Baby Maker, a film that explored surrogate motherhood. Criticizing the directing and writing of James Bridges, critic Shirley Rigby said of the "bizarre" film, "Only the performances in the film save it from being a total travesty." Rigby went on to say, "Barbara Hershey is a great little actress, much, much more than just another pretty face."

Hershey once said that starring in Boxcar Bertha (1972), "was the most fun I ever had on a movie." The film co-starred Hershey's domestic partner, David Carradine. Produced by Roger Corman, the film was Martin Scorsese's first Hollywood picture. Shot in 6 weeks on a budget of $600,000, Boxcar Bertha was intended to be a period crime drama similar to Corman's Bloody Mama (1970), or Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Although Corman publicized it as an exploitation piece with plenty of sex and violence, Scorsese's influence made it "something much more." Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun Times, said of the film's direction, "Martin Scorsese has gone for mood and atmosphere more than for action, and his violence is always blunt and unpleasant—never liberating and exhilarating, as the New Violence is supposed to be." A spread recreating sexually explicit scenes from the movie appeared in Playboy magazine in 1972.

Hershey's experience with Scorsese would extend to another major role for her 16 years later, in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) as Mary Magdalene. During the filming of Boxcar Bertha, Hershey had introduced Scorsese to the Nikos Kazantzakis novel on which the latter film was based. That collaboration resulted in an Academy Award nomination for the director and a Golden Globe nod for Hershey.

By the mid-1970s Hershey stated, "I've been so tied up with David that people have forgotten that I am me. I spend 50 percent of my time working with David." She had, in 1974, guest-starred in a two part episode of Carradine's television series, Kung Fu. She played, under the direction of Carradine, a love interest to his character, Kwai Chang Caine, during his time at the Shaolin temple. She also appeared in two of Carradine's independent directorial projects, You and Me (1975) and Americana (1983), both of which had been filmed in 1973. Her father, Arnold Herzstein, also appeared in Americana. She publicly acknowledged the desire to be recognized in her own right and later in 1974 she did just that, winning a Gold Medal at the Atlanta Film Festival for her role in the Dutch-produced film, Love Comes Quietly.

Later in the decade, Hershey starred with Charlton Heston in The Last Hard Men (1976). She hoped the film would revive her career after the damage she felt it had suffered while she was with Carradine. She believed that the hippie label she had been given was a career impediment. By this time she had shed Carradine and her "Seagull" pseudonym. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, however, she was appearing in made-for-TV movies that were described as "forgettable", like Flood! (1976),Sunshine Christmas (1977) and The Glitter Palace (1977), in which she played a lesbian.

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