Margaret O’Brien Net Worth

Margaret O’Brien's Quotes

• [at age six] When I cry, do you want the tears to run all the way or shall I stop halfway down?
• I met Shirley Temple on Valentine's Day in 1945. To this day, I've never forgotten it. I was in red, she was in black, and we enjoyed a wonderful dinner together. We didn't immediately become best friends, but every winter my husband and I would send a Christmas card to Shirley and she and her family would send one back. So we kept in touch that way. It helped that we both had wonderful parents who saw that we stayed on the right path. My husband always had a crush on Shirley, but he ended up with me instead. Sometimes people put a stamp on the world, and Shirley certainly did.
• [on Marjorie Main, with whom she worked on Bad Bascomb (1946)] Marjorie Main looked like she hadn't taken a bath in six months. Yet, she was a neat-freak. She'd go around looking for dust. Picking it up or wiping it off, whatever. She was also crazy as a loon. She had once been married but her husband was long dead. Yet she still talked to him--or to his ghost, just like he was there, which he wasn't. She had a place for him at lunch and babbled on to this corpse--it was bizarre. How she ever kept from being taken to the crazy house I will never know! A dozen years or so later I did a Wagon Train (1957) and Marjorie Main was on that also. She hadn't changed a bit, except she looked even older than she did in "Bad Bascomb".
• [on Wallace Beery, with whom she worked in Bad Bascomb (1946)] Wallace Beery couldn't stand me and I hated him! He was a mean old man, not nice at all. We shot on location, so the studio would have a truck come around with those boxed lunches. He would steal my lunch. He was that awful. My mother would have to go and get it away from him; if she didn't I would have to go hungry! The studio often paired him with Marjorie Main in an effort to recapture the chemistry of Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler in the olden days. Now I do not know what Beery and Dressler thought about each other, but I do know he didn't like Marjorie Main, and the feeling was mutual!
• [on Dan Duryea, with whom she worked on an episode of Wagon Train (1957)] Dan thought he was this great ladies' man, chasing everything in skirts. Well, not everything--he left Marjorie Main alone.

Interesting Facts about Margaret O’Brien

1. Received the Women's International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award. [1996]
2. In a practice common among child actors at the time, O'Brien adopted as her professional first name the name of the character who was her first credited part in Journey for Margaret (1942).
3. Her special Academy Award as Outstanding Juvenile Performer for Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) was stolen and she was unable to regain it for nearly fifty years when two memorabilia collectors came across it at a swap meet and managed to give it back to O'Brien.
4. Gave birth to her only child, daughter Mara Tolene Thorsen. [1977]
5. In 1959, Ms. O'Brien starred in a national stage tour of "The Young And The Beautiful" by author Sally Benson (creator of the book that became O'Brien's most famous film, Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)). Co-starring opposite O'Brien in the stage play of "The Young And The Beautiful" was Dirk Wayne Summers, who later became an award winning writer and director in films and television.
6. In April 2006 she was presented with one of the first two Lifetime Achievement Awards ever awarded by the SunDeis Film Festival at Brandeis University. Celeste Holm received the other.
7. In Italy, almost all of her films were dubbed by Loredana Randisi.
8. Stated on Turner Classic Movie's Private Screenings: Child Stars (2006), that she is half Spanish.
9. For her role as "Beth" in Little Women (1949), she worked again with Mary Astor, who played her mother "Marmee", and also played her mother in Meet Me In St. Louis (1944). In this film, she also worked again with Harry Davenport, who played "Dr. Barnes" and who played her grandfather in Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), and also with June Allyson, who had already played her sister in Music for Millions (1944).