Barbara Harris has died

[edjames]

One or the greats of Broadway. A short career. She left the business in search of a less public life.

A talented stage and screen actress. May she rest in peace....

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/obituaries/barbara-harris-dies.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftheater&action=click&contentCollection=theater&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

 

 

Barbara Harris, Stage, Screen and Improv Actress, Dies at 83

 

• Aug. 21, 2018
  

Barbara Harris, who was a founding member of the Second City improvisational theater and went on to win a Tony Award for her lead role in the musical “The Apple Tree” and to appear in films like “A Thousand Clowns” and “Nashville,” died on Tuesday in hospice care in Scottsdale, Ariz. She was 83.

 

Charna Halpern, a friend and a founder of the Chicago improv theater iO, said the cause was metastatic lung cancer.

 

Ms. Harris was part of a revolution in improvisation in Chicago — first with the Compass Players, whose members also included Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Ed Asner, and then with the Second City, which Paul Sills, her husband at the time, helped start in 1959.

 

She was the first performer seen onstage at the Second City’s opening night, singing “Everybody’s in the Know” while framed by a spotlight.

 

“It all began with Barbara Harris,” the Second City said on its website on Tuesday.

 

When a revue called “From the Second City” opened on Broadway in 1961, Ms. Harris was lauded by Howard Taubman of The New York Times for her “unusual and varied talents.” He cited a “hugely diverting encounter” in a sketch in which she played an introverted girl and Alan Arkin played a guitar-playing beatnik spouting nonsensical lingo.

 

Ms. Harris shifted easily between comedy and drama, from kooky to serious, on both screen and stage. But she was a reluctant star who disliked fame, chose films she thought would fail and preferred not to be recognized for her work.

 

“I’m much more interested in what’s behind acting, which is the inquiry into the human condition,” she told the newspaper Phoenix New Times in 2002 after she had retired to teach acting. “Everyone gets acting mixed up with the desire to be famous, but some of us really just stumbled into the fame part, while we were really just interested in the process of acting.”

 

For a while, though, she was a famous actress. In 1965,

, the psychically gifted young woman with a past life, in the Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane Broadway musical “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”

 

After earning a Tony nomination for that role, she won the Tony in 1967 for her performance in “The Apple Tree,” three stories that were set to music by Jerry Bock, with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick.

 

In the first piece, Ms. Harris played Eve to Alan Alda’s Adam.

 

“She is Eve to the toenails,” Walter Kerr wrote in The Times, “Eve to the single ringlets that spill down over her shoulders, Eve to the baby-bright eyes that are so enchantingly startled as they look into a reflecting pool. A man couldn’t make do without this Eve, it turns out.”

 

Ms. Harris never acted on Broadway again, but by the late 1960s her film career was in full swing. She received an Oscar nomination for her supporting role in “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?” (1971), starring Dustin Hoffman, and Golden Globe nominations for her roles in Robert Altman’s “Nashville” (1975), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Family Plot” (1976) and Gary Nelson’s “Freaky Friday” (1976), in which she and Jodie Foster, as mother and daughter, traded bodies.

 

In his review of “Nashville,” which was directed largely as an improvisation, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times praised Ms. Harris’s portrayal of a runaway wife who sings to a frightened crowd after a shooting. The film’s closing minutes, he wrote, “with Barbara Harris finding herself, to her astonishment, onstage and singing ‘It Don’t Worry Me,’ are unforgettable and heartbreaking.”

 

Barbara Densmoor Harris was born on July 25, 1935, in Evanston, Ill. Her father, Oscar, held various jobs, including tree surgeon and restaurant owner. Her mother, Natalie (Densmoor) Harris, taught piano, played organ and made costumes.

 

“I wanted to be a dancer,” Ms. Harris told The Times in 1965, “but I stopped dancing in high school.”

 

After high school, she began performing at the Playwrights Theater Clubin Chicago, the precursor to the Compass Players. Mr. Sills was also a founder of the Playwrights troupe, and the performers included Mr. Asner and Zohra Lampert. Ms. Harris’s marriage to Mr. Sills, which was brief, ended in divorce.

 

No immediate family members survive.

 

After the 1970s, Ms. Harris acted less frequently; in her final film, “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1997), she played the mother of a hit man (John Cusack).

 

“I don’t miss it,” she told Phoenix New Times. “I think the only thing that drew me to acting in the first place was the group of people I was working with: Ed Asner, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May. And all I really wanted to do back then was rehearsal.

 

“I was in it for the process,” she continued, “and I really resented having to go out and do a performance for an audience because the process stopped; it had to freeze and be the same every night.”

[N13]

I fell in love with her in "Apple Tree" and it continued with "Nashville." She was an amazing talent but didn't appear to have the heart for fame as indicated above.

[samhexum]

I think the only thing I ever saw her in was Piggy Sue Got Married. I may have seen Grosse Pointe Blank. If I did, it wasn't memorable.

 

Zohra Lampert

 

That reminds me... I need to buy a can of Goya beans.

[bnm73]

I fell in love with her in "Apple Tree" and it continued with "Nashville." She was an amazing talent but didn't appear to have the heart for fame as indicated above.

For a while, she also had a problem with shooting speed. She was getting shots from "Dr. Feelgood" Max Jacobsen during On a Clear Day You Can See Forever that consisted of vitamins, minerals....and methadrine.

[+ WilliamM]

I only saw Barbara Harris in On A Clear Day...., but she was memorable. It was over 50 years ago, That night she brough magic to a Boston try out stage.

 

If Harris came to dislike giving essentially the same perfermance every night, it was a loss for audiences.

 

I never saw Kim Stanley, who had a similiar career. But, I came close. By the time I saw 'The Three Sisters," Stanley had left (1964).

[TruHart1]

RIP.

 

I thought she was an excellent actress in the films she was in. I was just the right age to really enjoy both she and Jodie Foster in the original Freaky Friday. My greatest and most lasting impression of her though, was her amazing and committed rendition of 'On the S.S. Bernard Cohn' on the original Broadway cast album (still years before I ever travelled to NYC for the first time!) of "On a Clear Day" which I was disappointed to find was cut in the 1970 film starring Barbra Streisand.

 

A relatively short but fine career. A great lady of stage and screen!

 

TruHart1

[edjames]

NYPost columnist Michael Riedel writes in today's column:

 

How these late theater greats changed Broadway forever

By Michael Riedel. August 23, 2018 | 7:27pm

 

Brian Murray, Barbara Harris and Craig ZadanGetty Images; Everett Collection

 

Not to drop a name, but I was at a dinner party once with Robert De Niro (thump!) who said the actress he admired most was Barbara Harris.

 

De Niro was a student at the Actors Studio in New York in the 1960s where Harris, then on the verge of Broadway stardom, was a member. She rehearsed scenes and monologues in front of De Niro and other aspiring young actors, who were awed by her style and technique.

 

Harris died this week at 83 from lung cancer, after acclaimed performances in Broadway’s “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” and films including “Nashville,” “Family Plot” and “The Seduction of Joe Tynan.”

 

She could have been a big star, says her “On a Clear Day” co-star John Cullum, but she never pushed for it.

 

Louis Jourdan (who was replaced by John Cullum) and Barbara Harris during tryouts for “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”

 

“She was so fast and so talented,” he says. “She could have been tops in her field, but I don’t think she thought acting was the most important thing you could do with your life.”

 

She’d drop out of sight after a show closed and friends would be surprised to see her working at an art gallery in the Village or, in one instance, behind the perfume counter at Bloomingdale’s.

 

She was eccentric, onstage and off.

 

“You never knew what she was going to do,” Cullum says. “She loved to improvise. If I had a line — ‘Why are you smiling?’ — she’d frown. It was charming, but it was difficult. She’d be floating all over the place, and the audience loved it.” And there was always an edge to her performance.

 

“She was always on the verge of something,” he says. “She never went bananas, but there was something lurking there, something a little dark.”

 

Offstage, Harris would sometimes dress like a bag lady and duck out of the theater before VIPs could come backstage to meet her.

 

She had little interest in promoting herself, or her show.

 

When “Clear Day” began to wilt at the box office, the press agent lined up a Time magazine profile of her. A Time story, back in the ’60s, always sold tickets.

 

But at the last minute, Harris refused to do the interview.

 

“I never knew why,” Cullum says. “She just didn’t want to do it. It didn’t matter to her … And the show closed.”

 

One of Edward Albee’s favorite actors was Brian Murray, who died this week at 80.

 

“You never have to worry about your play when you have an actor like Brian in it,” Albee once told me. “He doesn’t get things wrong.”

 

Murray, who was born in South Africa, appeared on Broadway in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Little Foxes” and an acclaimed revival of “The Crucible.”

 

He had remarkable stage chemistry with another of Albee’s favorite actors, Marian Seldes. They turned in memorable performances in Albee’s 2001 play “The Play About the Baby.”

 

“It was my extraordinary luck at a very advanced age to work with Marian,” Murray once said. “She was a leading lady, and I really have to use both those words actively. She was leading. And if ever there was one, a lady.”

 

Murray loved to tell the story of how Seldes caught an early preview of a production of “Tartuffe” that he directed.

 

“It was dreadful,” he said. “I was hanging my head and she came up to me and said, ‘Darling, it’s got to get better!’”

 

Craig Zadan, the movie, theater and TV producer, also died this week — at 69, from complications following shoulder surgery.

 

He produced the revival of “Promises, Promises” starring Kristin Chenoweth, as well as 2002’s movie musical of “Chicago” and the live TV broadcasts of “Hairspray” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

 

Many Broadway fans have his book “Sondheim & Co.” in their libraries. Zadan, who as a young man was close to Stephen Sondheim, wrote it in the 1970s and ’80s.

 

While there have been many other books about Sondheim since then — two by the great man himself — for my money, Zadan’s is still the best. Sondheim gave him many hours of interviews and spoke candidly about his musicals “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”

 

“Sondheim & Co.” has good gossip but is never malicious. It’s clear Sondheim trusted Zadan, and the composer’s assessments of his shows are lively and sharp.

Sondheim & Co.” in their libraries. Zadan, who as a young man was close to Stephen Sondheim, wrote it in the 1970s and ’80s.

 

While there have been many other books about Sondheim since then — two by the great man himself — for my money, Zadan’s is still the best. Sondheim gave him many hours of interviews and spoke candidly about his musicals “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”

 

“Sondheim & Co.” has good gossip but is never malicious. It’s clear Sondheim trusted Zadan, and the composer’s assessments of his shows are lively and sharp.

 

It’s a book well worth re-reading, or catching anew.

[+ WilliamM]

Albee's 'The Play About The Baby" is also known for providing a hour or so of David Burtka naked on stage.

 

Apologies to the wonderful Brian Murray