In a career spanning more than 50 years, she has played a variety of roles on television and in cinema in several genres, including westerns and comedies.

[2] Hershey won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries/TV Film for her role in A Killing in a Small Town (1990).

Establishing a reputation early in her career as a hippie, Hershey experienced conflict between her personal life and her acting goals.

[7] Her father's parents were Jewish emigrants from Hungary and Russia,[8] while her mother, a native of Arkansas, was a Presbyterian of Scots-Irish descent.

Her high-school drama coach helped her find an agent, and in 1965, at age 17, she landed a role on Sally Field's television series Gidget.

On the set, she met and began a romantic relationship with actor David Carradine,[7] who later starred in the television series Kung Fu (see Personal life).

Though the film, directed by Frank Perry, received an X rating for the graphic rape scene, Burns earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance.

Finally, when the scene was finished, the director, Frank Perry, told me the bird had broken her neck on the last throw.

"[19] The film, co-starring Hershey's domestic partner, David Carradine, and produced by Roger Corman, was Martin Scorsese's first Hollywood picture.

Shot in six weeks on a budget of $600,000, Boxcar Bertha was intended to be a period crime drama similar to Corman's Bloody Mama (1970) or Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

[19][20] Hershey's experience with Scorsese was extended to another major role for her 16 years later in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) as Mary Magdalene.

She played, under the direction of Carradine, a love interest to his character, Kwai Chang Caine, during his time at the Shaolin temple.

[24] Hershey landed a role in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man (1980), marking a return to the big screen after four years[11] and earning her critical praise.

[23] Some of the "women roles" that followed The Stunt Man included the horror movie The Entity (1982); Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983), in which she played Glennis Yeager, wife of test pilot Chuck Yeager; and The Natural (1984), in which she shot Robert Redford's character, inspired by a real-life incident where Ruth Ann Steinhagen shot ballplayer Eddie Waitkus.

[23] Hershey followed Hannah and Her Sisters with back-to-back wins for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for Shy People[3][28] and for her appearance as anti-apartheid activist Diana Roth in A World Apart (1988).

Barbara Cloud of the Pittsburgh Press gave attribution to Hershey for starting a trend when she had collagen injected into her lips for her role in Beaches (1988).

[34] Also in 1990, Hershey drew upon what Woody Allen once described as her "erotic overtones",[35] portraying a woman who falls in love with her much younger nephew by marriage, played by Keanu Reeves, in the comedic Tune in Tomorrow.

In this Showtime production, Hershey collaborated again with A Killing in a Small Town director Stephen Gyllenhaal to play a woman who has an affair with her husband's lawyer.

Her husband, an abusive bigot (played by Dennis Hopper), is on trial for murdering a young African American girl.

[36] The film, which was based on Pete Dexter's 1988 National Book Award-winning novel, featured Hopper and Hershey enacting a graphic rape scene that the actress found difficult to view.

Later in the year, Hershey played an attorney defending her college roommate for the murder of her husband in the suspenseful whodunit Defenseless (1991).

"[39] She starred in another TV miniseries in 1993, succeeding Anjelica Huston as Clara Allen in the sequel series Return to Lonesome Dove.

[41] Hershey co-starred with Joe Pesci as a nightclub owner in the film drama The Public Eye (1992) and as the abused estranged wife of a homicidal Michael Douglas in the thriller Falling Down (1993).

Hershey earned an Oscar nomination[42] and won the Best Supporting Actress award from the National Society of Film Critics for her role as Madame Serena Merle in that picture.

In 1999, Hershey starred in an independent film called Drowning on Dry Land; during production she met co-star Naveen Andrews, with whom she began a romantic relationship that lasted until 2010.

Hershey appeared as an American actress, Mrs. Hubbard, in an adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express for the British television series Poirot (starring David Suchet), which aired in the United States on Public Broadcast Service in July 2010.

[48] Also in 2010, Hershey co-starred in Darren Aronofsky's acclaimed psychological thriller Black Swan (2010) opposite Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.

[54] The relationship fell apart around the time of Carradine's 1974 burglary arrest,[55] after he had begun an affair with Season Hubley, who had guest-starred in Kung Fu.

In 1979, a blunt newspaper article from the Knight News Service referenced this period of her life, saying of her acting career that "it looked as if she blew it.

The ceremony took place at her home in Oxford, Connecticut, where the only guests were their two mothers and Hershey's then 19-year-old son, Tom (né Free) Carradine.