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Margaret O'Brien

Margaret O'Brien

Actor · b. 1937 · San Diego, California, USA

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. She was born Angela Maxine O'Brien; (she later changed her name 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.[1]; 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", 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 Margaret with her Journey For Margaret and The Canterville Ghost co-star Robert Young. Description above from the Wikipedia article Margaret O'Brien, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Movies24

  • Movie7.4

    Little Women

    1949 · 233 votes

  • Movie7.0

    Meet Me in St. Louis

    1944 · 438 votes

  • Movie6.9

    Jane Eyre

    1943 · 157 votes

  • Movie7.4

    That's Entertainment!

    1974 · 71 votes

  • Movie9.0

    Boda Diabólica

    Diabolic Wedding

    1971 · 1 votes

  • Movie7.2

    Madame Curie

    1943 · 52 votes

  • Movie7.1

    The Secret Garden

    1949 · 34 votes

  • Movie8.3
  • Movie6.4

    Thousands Cheer

    1943 · 21 votes

  • Movie5.8

    Heller in Pink Tights

    1960 · 32 votes

  • Movie7.5
  • Movie8.0

    Twenty Years After

    1944 · 2 votes

  • Movie6.9

    The Canterville Ghost

    1944 · 47 votes

  • Movie10.0

    Showbiz Goes to War

    1982 · 1 votes

  • Movie6.6

    Babes on Broadway

    1941 · 25 votes

  • Movie6.0
  • Movie7.0
  • Movie4.2
  • Movie7.2

    Amy

    1981 · 19 votes

  • Movie4.8
  • Movie6.9
  • Movie2.0

    This Is Our Christmas

    2018 · 3 votes

  • Movie
  • Movie7.2

Series24

  • TV7.5
  • TV7.0

    What's My Line?

    1950 · 29 votes

  • TV5.8

    The Mike Douglas Show

    1961 · 11 votes

  • TV7.7

    Perry Mason

    1957 · 139 votes

  • TV7.5

    Murder, She Wrote

    1984 · 471 votes

  • TV6.8

    Ironside

    1967 · 71 votes

  • TV6.2

    Love, American Style

    1969 · 21 votes

  • TV5.7

    Dr. Kildare

    1961 · 19 votes

  • TV7.1

    Adam-12

    1968 · 48 votes

  • TV6.6

    Wagon Train

    1957 · 31 votes

  • TV5.3

    Matinee Theater

    1955 · 7 votes

  • TV5.4

    Studio One

    1948 · 13 votes

  • TV6.0
  • TV6.8

    Hotel

    1982 · 26 votes

  • TV3.8

    Climax!

    1954 · 12 votes

  • TV7.9

    Combat!

    1962 · 119 votes

  • TV5.9
  • TV7.2

    Tales from the Darkside

    1984 · 95 votes

  • TV7.0

    The Oscars

    1953 · 84 votes

  • TV7.2

    Rawhide

    1959 · 49 votes

  • TV6.6

    Marcus Welby, M.D.

    1969 · 20 votes

  • TV6.8

    The Ed Sullivan Show

    1948 · 23 votes

  • TV6.2

    The Steve Allen Show

    1956 · 6 votes

  • TV6.1

    Adventures in Paradise

    1959 · 7 votes