Margaret O'Brien (born January 15, 1937 in San Diego, California) is an Academy Award-winning American film actress, and although her career was brief, was one of the most highly regarded child actors in cinema history.
Born Angela Maxine O'Brien, her father, a circus performer, died months after her birth; Margaret's mother, Gladys Flores, was a well-known flamenco dancer who often performed with her sister Marissa, also a dancer. Margaret is of half-Irish and half-Spanish ancestry.
She made her first film appearance in Babes on Broadway (1941) at the age of four, but it was the following year that her first major role brought her widespread attention. As a five-year-old in Journey for Margaret (1942), O'Brien won wide praise for her convincing acting style. By 1943, she was considered a big enough star to have a cameo appearance in the all-star military show finale of Thousands Cheer.
She played a young French girl, and spoke and sang all her dialogue with a French accent, in Jane Eyre (1944). Arguably her most memorable role was as "Tootie" in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), opposite Judy Garland. O'Brien had by this time added singing and dancing to her achievements and was rewarded with an Academy Juvenile Award the following year as the "outstanding child actress of 1944." Her other successes included The Canterville Ghost (1944), Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), and the first sound version of The Secret Garden (1949), but she was unable to make the transition to adult roles.
A 1946 Looney Tunes short, Book Revue, placed a caricature of O'Brien in the role of Little Red Riding Hood.
Margaret later shed her child star image in 1958 by appearing on the cover of Life Magazine with the caption "The Girl's Grown"'. O'Brien's acting roles as an adult have been few and far between, mostly in small independent films. However, she does do occasional interviews, mostly for the Turner Classic Movies cable network. She played the role of Betsy Stauffer, a small town nurse, in "The Incident of the Town in Terror" on television's Rawhide. Another rare television outing was as a guest star on the popular Marcus Welby, M.D. in the early 1970s, reuniting Margaret with her The Canterville Ghost co-star Robert Young.
She has been married twice, to Harold Allen, Jr. from 1959 to 1968, and later to Roy Thorsen. The later marriage produced her only child, Mara Tolene Thorsen, born in 1977. Margaret is that rare child star who did not wind up fighting off poverty and addictions in later life. All her memories of her child star days are happy ones, except for working with the difficult Wallace Beery, who would pinch her to the point where crew members would have to protect her.
O'Brien has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Motion Pictures at 6608 Hollywood Boulevard, and for television at 1620 Vine St. In 2006, she was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the SunDeis Film Festival at Brandeis University.
Filmography
Year
Film
Role
Other notes
1941
Babes on Broadway
Maxine, Little Girl at Audition
uncredited
1942
Journey for Margaret
Margaret White
1943
You, John Jones!
Their daughter
short subject
Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case
Margaret
Thousands Cheer
Customer in Red Skelton Skit
Madame Curie
Irene Curie (at age 5)
Lost Angel
Alpha
1944
Jane Eyre
Adele Varens
The Canterville Ghost
Lady Jessica de Canterville
Meet Me in St. Louis
'Tootie' Smith
Music for Millions
Mike
1945
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
Selma Jacobson
1946
Bad Bascomb
Emmy
Three Wise Fools
Sheila O'Monahan
1947
The Unfinished Dance
'Meg' Merlin
1948
Big City
Midge
Tenth Avenue Angel
Flavia Mills
1949
Little Women
Beth March
The Secret Garden
Mary Lennox
1951
Her First Romance
Betty Foster
1952
Futari no hitomi
Girls Hand in Hand US title
1956
Glory
Clarabel Tilbee
1960
Heller in Pink Tights
Della Southby
1965
Agente S 3 S operazione Uranio
1968
Annabel Lee
1974
Diabolique Wedding
aka Diabolic Wedding
That's Entertainment!
Herself and archive footage
1981
Amy
Hazel Johnson
aka Amy on the Lips
1996
Sunset After Dark
1998
Creaturealm: From the Dead
Herself
segment Hollywood Mortuary
2000
Child Stars: Their Story
Herself
aka Child Stars
2002
Dead Season
Friendly Looking Lady
2004
The Mystery of Natalie Wood
Herself
2005
Boxes
Herself
short subject
2006
Store
Herself
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Margaret O'Brien
Official homepage
Margaret O'Brien at the Internet Movie Database
NewPP limit report
Preprocessor node count: 512/1000000
Post-expand include size: 5973/2048000 bytes
Template argument size: 2078/2048000 bytes
Expensive parser function count: 1/500
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_O%27Brien"
Categories: 1937 births | Living people | Academy Juvenile Award winners | American film actors | American child actors | Hollywood Walk of Fame | Irish-Americans | Spanish-AmericansHidden categories: Articles with unsourced statements since December 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007
Views
Article
Discussion
Edit this page
History
Personal tools
Log in / create account
if (window.isMSIE55) fixalpha();
Navigation
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Search
Interaction
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Donate to Wikipedia
Help
Toolbox
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Printable version Permanent linkCite this page
Languages
Deutsch
Français
Nederlands
Português
Suomi
Svenska
This page was last modified on 15 August 2008, at 12:35.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook();
