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Born to a blue-blooded New England family, Barbara O'Neil was 21 when she made her first Broadway appearance. During the summer season, she acted with the Provincetown Players, often in the company of her first husband, producer Joshua Logan. She made her film debut in 1937, marking time in traditional leading lady roles until cast as Scarlett O'Hara's mother in Gone With the Wind (1939), delivering an utterly convincing performance despite the fact that she was exactly three years older than her "daughter" Vivien Leigh. Her finest screen showing was as Charles Boyer's spiteful, dangerously neurotic wife in All This and Heaven Too (1940), for which she earned an Oscar nomination. Barbara O'Neil made only a handful of film appearances after that, retiring from show business after a successful run in the Broadway production Little Moon of Alban.