Margaret O'Brien

Margaret O'Brien
Margaret O'Brien
Born	Angela Maxine O'Brien January 15, 1937 (1937-01-15) San Diego, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1941–present
Spouse	Harold Allen, Jr. (1959–1968) (divorced) Roy Thorsen (1974–present) 1 daughter

Margaret O'Brien, age 11, at Los Angeles Union Station, 1948.

Margaret O'Brien (born January 15, 1937) is an American film and stage actress. Although her film career as a leading character was brief, she was one of the most popular child actors in cinema history. In her later career, she appeared on stage and in supporting film roles.

Life and career

She was born Angela Maxine O'Brien; her name was later changed to Margaret following the success of the film Journey for Margaret, in which she played the title role. Her father Lawrence O'Brien, a circus performer, died before she was born. O'Brien's mother, Gladys Flores, was a well-known flamenco dancer who often performed with her sister Marissa, also a dancer. O'Brien 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.

O'Brien later shed her child star image in 1958 by appearing on the cover of Life Magazine with the caption "The Girl's Grown", and was a mystery guest on the TV panel show What's My Line?. 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 O'Brien with her Journey For Margaret and The Canterville Ghost co-star Robert Young.

Personal life

She has been married twice, to Harold Allen, Jr. from 1959 to 1968, and later to Roy Thorsen. The latter marriage produced her only child, Mara Tolene Thorsen, born in 1977.

Lost Academy Award

Growing up, O'Brien's awards were always kept in a special room. One day in 1954, the family's maid asked to take O'Brien's Juvenile Oscar and two other awards home with her to polish, as she had done in the past. After three days, the maid failed to return to work, prompting O'Brien's mother to discharge her, requesting that the awards be returned. Not long after, O'Brien's mother, who had been sick with a heart condition, suffered a relapse and died. In mourning, 17 year-old O'Brien forgot about the maid and the Oscar until several months later when she tried to contact her, only to find that the maid had moved and had left no forwarding address.

Several years later, upon learning that the original had been stolen, the Academy promptly supplied O'Brien with a replacement Oscar, but O'Brien still held onto hope that she might one day recover her original Award. In the years that followed, O'Brien attended memorabilia shows and searched antique shops, hoping she might find the original statuette, until one day in 1995 when Bruce Davis, then executive director of the Academy, was alerted that a miniature statuette bearing O'Brien's name had surfaced in a catalogue for an upcoming memorabilia auction. Davis contacted a mutual friend of his and O'Brien's, who in turn phoned O'Brien to tell her the long-lost Oscar had been found.

Memorabilia collectors Steve Neimand and Mark Nash were attending a flea market in 1995 when Neimand spotted a small Oscar with Margaret O'Brien's name inscribed upon it. The two men decided to split the $500 asking price hoping to resell it at a profit and lent it to a photographer to shoot for an upcoming auction catalogue. This led to Bruce Davis' discovery that the statuette had resurfaced and, upon learning of the award's history, Nash and Neimand agreed to return the Oscar to O'Brien. On February 7, 1995, almost fifty years after she'd first received it, the Academy held a special ceremony in Beverly Hills to return the stolen award to O’Brien. Upon being reunited with her Juvenile Oscar, Margaret O'Brien told the attending journalists:

“For all those people who have lost or misplaced something that was dear to them, as I have, never give up the dream of searching – never let go of the hope that you’ll find it because after all these many years, at last, my Oscar has been returned to me.”

Hollywood Walk of Fame

O'Brien in 2010.

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

Circa 1952.

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	Academy Juvenile Award
	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	Katherine McDermott	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
2009	Dead in Love	Cris

"Project Lodestar Sagas " 2009-2011 Science Fiction Feature and Cable Series- Lead role of Livia Wells source www.myspace.com/project_lodestar_sagas

External links

• Official homepage
• Margaret O'Brien at the Internet Movie Database