Barbara Hershey - Personal Life

Personal Life

In 1969 Barbara Hershey met David Carradine while they were working on Heaven With a Gun. The pair began a domestic relationship that would last until 1975. Carradine said that during the rape scene in that movie he cracked one of Barbara's ribs. They appeared in other films together including Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha. In 1972, the couple posed together in a nude Playboy spread, recreating some sex scenes from Boxcar Bertha''. Later in 1972, Hershey gave birth to their son, Free, who changed his name to Tom when he was 9 years old. The relationship fell apart, around the time of Carradine's 1974 burglary arrest, after he had begun an affair with Season Hubley who had guest starred in Kung Fu.

During this period, Hershey changed her stage name to "Seagull." A blunt newspaper article from the Knight News Service, in 1979, referenced this period of her life saying of her acting career, "it looked as if she blew it." The article referred to Hershey as a "kook" and stated that she was frequently "high on something." In addition to that criticism, she had been ostracized for breast-feeding her son during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, and for breast-feeding him beyond the age of two years old. She said that this period of her life hurt her career; "Producers wouldn't see me because I had a reputation for using drugs and being undependable. I never used drugs at all and I have always been serious about my acting career." After splitting up with Carradine, she changed her stage name back to "Hershey," explaining that she had told the story of why she adopted the name "Seagull" so many times that it had lost its meaning.

By the time Hershey was 42, she was described by columnist Luaina Lee as a "private person who was mired in some heavy publicity when she first became a professional actress." Yardena Arar, writing for the Los Angeles Daily News, confirmed that Hershey had become a private person by 1990. On August 8, 1992, she married artist Stephen Douglas. The ceremony took place at her home in Oxford, Connecticut, where the only guests were their two mothers and Hershey's son, Tom (né Free) Carradine, who was 19 years old at the time. They were separated and divorced one year after wedding. Hershey began dating actor Naveen Andrews in 1999. During a brief separation in 2005, Andrews fathered a child with another woman. In May 2010, after Andrews won sole custody of his son, the couple announced that they had ended their 12-year relationship six months earlier.