Barbara Hershey

2002 - Winner - Munich Film Festival - CineMerit Award. She was survived by her husband (John Hansbury), mother (Paula Kahn), brother (Jeffrey Kahn), and niece (Eliza Kahn). 2001 - Winner - If Awards - Best Actress - Lantana (shared with Kerry Armstrong, Rachel Blake, Daniella Farinacci and Leah Purcell). She was only 57 years old. 1999 - Nominee - Golden Satellite Awards - Best Actress in a TV Film - The Staircase. In the final years of her life, she played a major role on the sitcom Cosby and voiced Gypsy the moth in A Bug's Life, before succumbing to ovarian cancer on December 3, 1999. 1997 - Winner - National Society of Film Critics Awards USA - Best Supporting Actress - The Portrait of a Lady. At the end of her career, she returned to the stage and won a Tony Award for her role in The Sisters Rosensweig, a play by Wendy Wasserstein.

1997 - Nominee - Academy Awards - Best Supporting Actress - The Portrait of a Lady. After her success in Brooks's films, she played in a number of less successful films in the 1980s. 1997 - Nominee - Golden Globes - Best Supporting Actress - The Portrait of a Lady. Kahn's roles were primarily comedic rather than dramatic. 1996 - Winner - Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards - Best Supporting Actress - The Portrait of a Lady. For her work in Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles, the young comedienne received nominations for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. 1991 - Winner - Golden Globes - Best Actress in a TV Film - Killing in a Small Town. The final three films were all directed by Mel Brooks, who many Hollywood observers claimed was able to bring out the best of Kahn's comic talents.

1991 - Nominee - Emmy Awards - Outstanding Lead Actress in A Miniseries/TV Film - Paris Trout. Her most famous roles followed in the 1970s: she appeared in What's Up, Doc? (1972), Paper Moon (1973), Young Frankenstein (1974), Blazing Saddles (1974), and High Anxiety (1977). 1990 - Winner - Emmy Awards - Outstanding Lead Actress In A Miniseries/TV Film - Killing in a Small Town. She debuted in the movies that same year with a role in De Düva: The Dove. 1989 - Nominee - Golden Globes - Best Supporting Actress - The Last Temptation of Christ. In 1968, she earned her first break on Broadway with New Faces of 1968 and then performed her first lead role in the musical Candide. 1988 - Winner - Cannes Film Festival - Best Actress - A World Apart (shared with Jodhi May and Linda Mvusi). Just before adopting the professional name of Madeline Kahn (Kahn was her stepfather's last name), she made her stage debut as a chorus girl in a revival of Kiss Me Kate which led her to join the Actors' Equity.

1987 - Winner - Cannes Film Festival - Best Actress - Shy People. Kahn began auditioning for professional acting roles shortly after her graduation from Hofstra; on the side, she briefly taught public school in Levittown, NY. 1987 - Nominee - BAFTA Awards - Best Supporting Actress - Hannah and Her Sisters. After changing her major a number of times, Kahn graduated in 1964 with a degree in speech therapy. 1970 - Nominee - Laurel Awards - Female New Face - Last Summer. At Hofstra, she studied music, drama, and speech therapy and also performed in several campus productions. 1967 - Winner - Western Heritage Awards - Fictional Television Drama - The Monroes (shared with cast and crew). In 1960, she graduated from the Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, NY where she earned a drama scholarship to Hofstra University.

In what one hopes will not be her last hurrah as a film actress, she gave an unforgettable performance as Madame Merle in Jane Campion's 1996 adaptation of the Henry James novel "The Portrait of a Lady" - earning an Oscar nomination and winning the Best Supporting Actress award from the National Society of Film Critics. Ironically, Kahn soon began acting herself and performed in a number of school productions. But as an actress in her forties, she was once more forced into smaller independent films and television work. In 1948, Kahn was sent to a progressive boarding school in Pennsylvania and stayed there until 1952. During that time, her mother pursued her ambition as an actress. In 1990 she won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Special for her harrowing turn as real-life murderer Candy Morrison in "A Killing in a Small Town". A few years later, her mother remarried and this union gave Kahn two half-siblings (Jeffrey and Robyn). For her role in the 1988 Bette Midler sudser "Beaches", she injected collagen into her lips - an act that drew a ridiculous amount on negative media coverage. After the divorce was finalized, Kahn and her mother moved to New York City.

In mid-decade, she followed the commercial success of "Hannah and Her Sisters" with unprecedented back-to-back wins for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival and Scorsese's long-awaited but fatally controversial "The Last Temptation of Christ". Although Kahn's parents were high-school sweethearts, they divorced when she was only two years old. Her performance as Glynnis Yeager in Philip Kaufman's 1983 film of "The Right Stuff" marked the true beginning of her career renaissance. Her mother, Paula, was just 17 when Kahn was born. Yet even in such uninspiring material, Hershey found the means of a giving committed, affecting performance - sufficiently impressing Michael Douglas to have him later fight to have her cast as his estranged wife in "Falling Down". She was born on September 29, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts as Madeline Gail Wolfson. She would still need to pay dues in unglamorous vehicles like 1981's exploitation shocker "The Entity", where she played a woman repeatedly raped by an unseen supernatural force. Madeline Kahn was an actress of movie, television, and theatre.

The road back to industry acceptance would not be short or smooth. Cosby - 1996. But her excellent work in Richard Rush's 1980 critical favorite "The Stunt Man" - her first big screen appearance in four years - served as a reminder to Hollywood that there was still a notably beautiful and talented actress in their midst. London Suite - 1996. However, the hippie label soon became a career impediment and by the late 1970s she was reduced to appearing in made-for-TV embarrassments like "Flood!" and "Sunshine Christmas". New York News - 1995. In characteristically free-spirited fashion, they would later recreate their love scene in a hay-filled boxcar for a Playboy magazine pictorial. For Richer, for Poorer - 1992.

Hershey's co-star in "Boxcar Bertha" was once again David Carradine. Lucky Luke - 1991. 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. Welcome to the Monkey House - 1991. This image helped secure her the starring role in the 1972 Roger Corman production "Boxcar Bertha", which was being directed on the cheap by a fresh-out-of-film-school talent named Martin Scorsese. During filming, Hershey gave Scorsese a copy of her favorite book - Nikos Kazantzakis's "The Last Temptation of Christ". President - 1987. Her 1970 film "The Baby Maker" explored the idea of surrogate motherhood many years before it became a mainstream reproductive option and cemented her image as a free-spirited hippie. Mr.

Blazing Saddles - 1974. Frankweiler - 1973. Basil E. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs.