in competition: I wanted to cry better than June, and June wanted to cry better than me. The way my mother got me to cry was if I was having trouble with a scene, she'd say, 'why don't we have the make-up man come over and give you false tears?' Then I'd think to myself, 'they'll say I'm not as good as June,' and I'd start to cry." Her other successes included The Canterville Ghost (1944), Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), Bad Bascomb (1946) with Wallace Beery, and the first sound version of The Secret Garden (1949). She played Beth in the 1949 MGM release of Little Women, but she was unable to make the transition to adult roles. O'Brien later shed her child star image, appearing on a 1958 cover of Life magazine with the caption "How the Girl's Grown", and was a mystery guest on the TV panel show What's My Line?. O'Brien's acting appearances as an adult have been sporadic, mostly in small independent films and occasional television roles. She has also given interviews, mostly for the Turner Classic Movies cable network. Television O'Brien gave credit to television for helping her reform and modify her public image. In an interview in 1957, when she was 20, she said: "The wonderful thing about TV is that it has given me a chance to get out of the awkward age — something the movies couldn't do for me. No movie producer could really afford to take a chance at handing me an adult role." On November 20, 1950, she co-starred with Cecil Parker in "The Canterville Ghost", on Robert Montgomery Presents on TV. She appeared as the mystery guest on "What's My Line" November 24, 1957. On December 22, 1957, O'Brien starred in "The Young Years" on General Electric Theater. She played the role of Betsy Stauffer, a small-town nurse, in "The Incident of the Town in Terror" on television's Rawhide. She appeared in an episode of Wagon Train in 1958. She made a guest appearance on a 1963 episode of Perry Mason as Virginia Trent in "The Case of the Shoplifter's Shoe." In 1967, she made a guest appearance on the World War II TV drama Combat!. Also, in a 1968 two-part episode of Ironside ("Split Second to an Epitaph") O'Brien played a pharmacist who (quite the opposite of her usual screen persona) was involved in drug