Margaret O'Brien

Margaret O'Brien, born Angela Maxine O'Brien on January 15, 1937, is an American actress of half-Irish and half-Spanish ancestry. Her mother, Gladys Flores, was a flamenco dancer who frequently performed alongside her sister Marissa. O'Brien was raised Catholic.

O'Brien began her screen career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the age of four, making her first film appearance in Babes on Broadway in 1941. Her breakthrough came the following year with Journey for Margaret (1942), in which her performance as a five-year-old drew widespread praise for its convincing naturalism. By 1943 she had accumulated enough prominence to appear in a cameo in the all-star military revue Thousands Cheer, and that same year she co-starred with James Cagney and Ann Sothern in the MGM short You, John Jones!, in which she recited the Gettysburg Address. Also in 1943, she played Adèle, a young French girl, in Jane Eyre, delivering her dialogue and songs entirely in a French accent.

Her most celebrated film role came in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), opposite Judy Garland, in which she played the younger sister Tootie. The performance earned her a special Juvenile Academy Award at the 17th Academy Awards in 1944. During her years at MGM, O'Brien and June Allyson were informally known as "The Town Criers" of the studio. Additional notable films from her child star period include The Canterville Ghost (1944), Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), Bad Bascomb (1946) with Wallace Beery, the role of Beth in the 1949 MGM production of Little Women, and the first sound adaptation of The Secret Garden (1949).

O'Brien's stage work included Broadway appearances in 1934 in Iolanthe and The Gondoliers. In her later career she continued to work across multiple platforms, including television and supporting film roles. Television proved particularly significant in reshaping her public image after her child star years. In a 1957 interview, she credited the medium with allowing her to move past what she described as the awkward transitional age that film had been unable to help her navigate. Her television credits span several decades and include Robert Montgomery Presents (1950), General Electric Theater (1957), Rawhide, Wagon Train (1958), Perry Mason (1963), Combat! (1967), Ironside (1968), Marcus Welby, M.D. (early 1970s), and Murder, She Wrote (1991), the last of which reunited her with Tenth Avenue Angel co-star Angela Lansbury.

In February 1960, O'Brien received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures at 6606 Hollywood Boulevard and one for television at 1634 Vine Street. In 1990, the Young Artist Foundation presented her with its Former Child Star Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2006 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the SunDeis Film Festival at Brandeis University.

The history of O'Brien's Juvenile Oscar is notable in its own right. In 1954, the statuette was taken from the family home by a maid who had asked to polish it, along with two other awards, and never returned it. The Academy later provided O'Brien with a replacement, but she continued searching for the original for decades. In 1995, memorabilia collectors Steve Neimand and Mark Nash purchased a small Oscar bearing O'Brien's name at a flea market for $500, intending to resell it. Their listing of the item in an auction catalogue came to the attention of Academy executive director Bruce Davis, who traced it back to O'Brien. Nash and Neimand agreed to return the statuette, and on February 7, 1995, the Academy held a ceremony in Beverly Hills to formally restore the original award to O'Brien, nearly forty years after it had been stolen.

O'Brien was married to Harold Allen Jr. from August 9, 1959 until their divorce in 1968, and subsequently to steel-industry executive Roy Thorvald Thorsen from June 6, 1974 until his death in 2018. Their daughter, Mara Tolene Thorsen, was born in 1977.