Barbara Harris

At 83 years old, Barbara Harris has this physical status:

Career

For her Broadway debut in the original musical revue production From the Second City, which ran at the Royale Theatre from September 26, 1961 to December 9, 1961, a life member of Actors Studio Harris received a Tony Award nomination in 1962 for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical. The young Alan Arkin and Paul Sand were also included in the revue. The film, produced by Max Liebman (among others) and directed by Paul Sills, was shown to Harris by Caesar's Wife, First Affair, Museum Piece, and The Bergman Film.

Harris recalled her ambival over the troupe's transfer to New York from Chicago in a 2002 interview with the Phoenix New Times. "When I was in Second City, I had a vote about whether or not we should take our show to Broadway." Andrew Duncan and I declined. I lived in New York but only because Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner came and said, 'We want to write a musical for you!' Well, I wasn't keen on musical theater either. I had seen a portion of South Pacific in Chicago, and I walked out.

But it was Richard Rodgers calling!"

Although Rodgers and Lerner were busy writing their original script for her, she received the Theatre World Award for her role in Arthur Kopit's dark comedic farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet, and I'm Feeling So Sad. On a Sunny Day You Can See Forever (1965), Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane's Broadway musical created for her, she received a Tony Award for best Actress in a Musical for the sixth time. Daisy Gamble, a New Yorker who needs the help of a psychiatrist to quit smoking, appeared on the show Daisy Gamble. The ostensibly kooky, brash, and quirky character reveals surprising depths under hypnosis. She becomes enthralling to the psychiatrist as she reveals herself as a woman who has lived through many lifetimes, one of which tragically ended. Although observers disagreed on the show's merits, they lauded Harris's performance. The show opened on October 14, 1965 at the Mark Hellinger Theater and went on for 280 performances, receiving three Tony awards. Harris appeared on The Bell Telephone Hour ("The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner"), a nationally broadcast broadcast on February 27, 1966). Anne Bancroft appeared in a 1963 version of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, staged by Jerome Robbins at the Martin Beck Theater; she received five Tony Award nominations.

Harris appeared in The Apple Tree, another Broadway musical created for her, this time by composer Jerry Bock's team and lyricist Sheldon Harnick. The performance, which Harris co-starred Alan Alda and Larry Blyden and Mike Nichols, opened at the Shubert Theater on October 5, 1966 and closed on November 25, 1967. Three tales by Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton were based on three tales, and Jules Feiffer and Harris appeared in all three. Eve appeared in Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve, a melodramatically campy temptress in The Lady and the Tiger, and in Jules Feiffer's Passionella. She was the forlorn, soot-stained chimney-sweep who wants only to be "a gorgeous glamorous movie actress for its own sake" and, thanks in an instant costume change, the huge-bosomed, blonde bombshell of a movie star who had always wished she'd be. "There are some high triumphs of the imagination in the immensely original musical comedy," Richard Watts Jr. wrote. "[b]ut it is Miss Harris who gives it the extra touch of magic." Walter Kerr described her as "the square root of squeaky sex" and that "sweetness lasted well into infinity." Harris received the 1967 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical as well as Cue Magazine's "Entertainer of the Year" award. "Mike Nichols, a toughie," she said of her friend and colleague Mike Nichols in 2002. He may be generous, but if you weren't first-rate, watch out. He'd tell you."

After reading scripts for David Merrick, Harris produced The Penny Wars by Elliott Baker in 1969, starring Kim Hunter, George Voskovec, and Kristoffer Tabori. She stopped appearing on stage after The Apple Tree, except for the off-Broadway debut of Brecht and Weill's Mahagonny in 1970, in which she played Jenny, which was originally created by Lotte Lenya. "Who wants to be up on the stage all the time," Harris said in the 2002 interview. It isn't easy. You have to be ardently invested in the fame sphere, and I certainly wasn't. Whether I did well or not, I was worried about the discipline of acting."

She appeared on such popular television shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Naked City, Channing, and The Defenders from 1961 to 1964. Sandra Markowitz made her debut as a social worker in 1965's film version of A Thousand Clowns. She co-starred Jason Robards Jr., who played the freewheeling, eternally optimistic guardian of his teenage nephew's teen nephew, whose custody is threatened by authorities' dismissive of his bohemian lifestyle. On December 9, 1965, the New York Times critic wrote that "the film stars the young and sensational Barbara Harris playing the appropriate lightheaded woman." Harris and Robards received Golden Globe awards. She then watched Arthur Kopit's darkly comedic Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet, and I'm Feeling So Sad (1967) with Rosalind Russell as Robert Morse's monstrous mother who takes the stuffed body of her deceased husband along on trips. "Barbara Harris from the original play cast is as wacky as she was on stage," critic Bosley Crowther wrote about the tumultuous business of sex in the late 1950s. With the corpse falling out of the room every time she is supposed to score a field goal, she is still the funniest scene."

The "delightful" Harris' gifts "wasted" in Neil Simon's Plaza Suite (1971) with Walter Matthau, according to British entertainment journal Time Out. With Jack Lemmon, she had only marginally better odds in The War Between Men and Women (1972) (1972).

She was nominated for her 1971 film (which co-starred Dustin Hoffman) Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? About a wealthy, influential pop star enduring a crippling mental disorder, she was given an Oscar nomination. Herb Gardner, who also wrote A Thousand Clowns, wrote the script.

Harris appeared in one of her film debuts in Robert Altman's masterpiece Nashville in 1975, playing Albuquerque, a ditzy, scantily clad country singing hopeful who may be much more opportunistic and calculating than she would have appeared in. Accounts of the film's chaotic and inspired production, particularly in Jan Stuart's book The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece, point to a contest between actor and director. Harris received a Golden Globe nomination (one of 11 for the film) and, as Oscar-nominated co-star Lily Tomlin said, "I was the most hugest of Barbara Harris fans; I was so stunning and original." Despite the fact that the two were supposed to reunite with Altman in a sequel, the film was never made.

Alfred Hitchcock portrayed her in Family Plot as a bogus spiritualist in search of a missing heir and a family fortune with her cab driver boyfriend. Hitchcock, William Devane, and Karen Black were among a cast members whose enjoyment was particularly captivated by Harris' quirkiness, intelligence, and intelligence. Kritikers and a Golden Globe Award for the film, which was based on Victor Canning's book The Rainbird Pattern, and which marked a reunion of Hitchcock with Ernest Lehman, who had conceived the original screenplay for North by Northwest, received praise from critics and also a Golden Globe nomination. "She confessed to turning down Alfred Hitchcock in his first appearance in a one of his films in 2002" in a Phoenix New Times interview. "Hitchcock was a wonderful guy" after agreeing to be in Family Plot. Inasmuch as Harris appears in its final shot (in which she winks at the audience), she has the distinction of being the actress who ended Alfred Hitchcock's long and illustrious career.

Harris continued to appear in films from the 1970s-1980s, including Freaky Friday (1976) with a young Jodie Foster, Film Film for Director Stanley Donen, and The North Avenue Irregulars with Edward Herrmann and Cloris Leachman. Meryl Streep co-starred in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), a comedy about a liberal Washington Senator who is caught in a story about a young woman in a scene with a liberal Washington senator in an affair.

"Dinette Dusty," a recently widowed waitress and would-be singer starring Robert Blake, marries a boozy carwash employee to return her children from their paternal grandparents, she appeared in Second-Hand Hearts in 1981. The film, which was based on a highly awaited "road movie" screenplay by Charles Eastman, was a critical and box office failure that stymied everyone's careers. Vincent Canby's negative The New York Times' review of May 8, 1981 concluded, "[t]he film's one shining star is Barbara Harris, who plays Dinette as sincerely as possible under grueling conditions." And when she is supposed to be tacky, she is genuinely amusing as she tries to make sense of Loyal's muddled reasoning, which, of course, requires her to act." Harris was not on screen until 1986, when she appeared in Peggy Sue Got Married as Kathleen Turner's mother. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) and Grosse Point Blank (1997) were two of her last films.

Harris left acting and teaching. "Well, if anyone handed me something amazing for $10 million, I'd do it again," she said when asked if she'd resume her acting career in 2002. However, I haven't worked as an actor for a long time. I don't miss it. I suspect the only thing that brought me to acting in the first place was a team of people: Ed Asner, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May. And there's nothing I wanted to do back then but rehearsal. I was in it for the process, and I really resent the idea of going out and perform a show for an audience because the procedure had to cease; it had to freeze and remain the same every night. It wasn't as exciting."

Spunky Brandburn on Anne Manx on Amazonia, a XM Satellite Radio special, appeared briefly in 2005.

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