Barbara Harris

Young Barbara grew up in Chicago’s Northwest Side, where she would hitchhike home after classes at Senn High School. Actor Bruce Dern said in his memoirs that she also attended Wright Junior College. Her father Oscar Graham Harris worked for the Chicago Tribune, and her mother Natalie Densmoor Harris taught the piano to her four children. She began her acting career as a teenager at the Playwrights Theater Club in Chicago. From that day forth the acting bug at Playwrights bit her – she loved the buzz. However, it was not the performance in itself, the stage lights and the audience’s acclaim but the creative process that lured her in like a moth to the flame. This attitude was beautifully illustrated during an interview with the Phoenix New Times in 2002 after she moved to Arizona. “I used to try to get through one film a year,” she said. “But I always chose movies that I thought would fail so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the fame thing.” With the musical From the Second City’ in 1961, she made her debut on Broadway. For her performance, she was nominated for the Tony Award the following year as Best Actress in a Musical. In 1962, she was awarded the Theater World Award for Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad. In 1967 she won the Tony Award for the 1966 musical The Apple Tree. In 1966, after she starred in Broadway’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, writer Cecil Smith said that Ms. Harris “with the face of an errant chipmunk under haphazard blonde hair and darting dark eyes always seemed to be just on the brink of being discovered, whether in her early improv shows, onstage or in movies.”

She made her film debut in 1965 in the multiple Oscar-nominated theater adaptation A Thousand Clowns as a compassionate social worker who wants to protect a boy (Barry Gordon) from the idiosyncratic way of life of his childish author-uncle (Jason Robards) but then fell in love with him. In the 1960s and 1970s, the agile American actress with her round cheeks, big eyes, and the contemporary short haircut was one of the most refreshing comedy actors in US cinema. A subtle naivety that did not reveal a lack of intellect, but confidence in her interaction with her fellow human beings characterized the appearances of Barbara Harris in several of her noteworthy film roles. She starred as a sexually experienced child and took on the role in the macabre farce Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad in 1967 with her customary airy panache. Next up was Neil Simon's Plaza Suite (1971) with Walter Matthau, she earned an Oscar nomination for the 1971 tragic comedy, which co-starred Dustin Hoffman, Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? about a rich, successful, womanizing pop songwriter suffering a debilitating but oddly liberating mental crisis. The script was by Herb Gardner, who also wrote A Thousand Clowns. she was then in The War Between Men and Women (1972) with Jack Lemmon and Mixed Company (1974) with Tom Bosley.

Robert Altman used Barbara Harris’s vocal talent for his country music panorama Nashville (1975). Harris plays the satirically exaggerated key role of ‘Albuquerque,’ a scantily clad, ditzy country-singing hopeful. The movie starts with her leaving her older husband, as she tries her singing chances with manageable talent, but boundless optimism, only to fail repeatedly. At last, thanks to her steadfast musical commitment, in the chaos after the assassination of the country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), she finally gets her big break. Accounts of the film's chaotic and inspired production, particularly in Jan Stuart's book The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece, indicate a clash between actress and director. Harris earned a Golden Globe nomination (one of 11 for the film); as Oscar-nominated co-star Lily Tomlin put it, "I was the hugest of Barbara Harris fans; I thought she was so stunning and original." Although the two were set to reunite with Altman in a sequel, that film was never made. The following year, Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Family Plot as a bogus spiritualist who searches for a missing heir and a family fortune with her cab driver boyfriend. Among a cast that included Bruce Dern, William Devane, and Karen Black, Hitchcock was particularly delighted by Harris' quirkiness, skill and intelligence. She received praise from critics as well as a Golden Globe nomination for the film, which was based on the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning, and which marked a reunion of Hitchcock with Ernest Lehman, who had created the original screenplay for North by Northwest. In her 2002 Phoenix New Times interview, she admitted that she "turned down Alfred Hitchcock when he first asked me to be in one of his movies". After agreeing to star in Family Plot (1976) after Goldie Hawn turned it down, she recalled that "Hitchcock was a wonderful man." The film was Hitchcock's last and inasmuch as Harris appears by herself in its final shot (in which she winks at the audience), she has the distinction of being the actor who, so to speak, ended Alfred Hitchcock's long and illustrious career.

Harris continued to appear in films of the 1970s-80s, including Freaky Friday (1976) with a young Jodie Foster, Movie Movie (1978) for director Stanley Donen, and The North Avenue Irregulars (1979) with Edward Herrmann and Cloris Leachman. She co-starred in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) with one of her former Broadway leading men, Alan Alda (who also wrote the screenplay), a tale of a liberal Washington Senator caught in an affair with a younger woman, played by Meryl Streep. In 1981, she starred in Second-Hand Hearts for esteemed director Hal Ashby as "Dinette Dusty", a recently widowed waitress and would-be singer who marries a boozy carwash worker named "Loyal", played by Robert Blake to get back her children from their paternal grandparents. The film, based on a highly sought-after "road movie" screenplay by Charles Eastman, was a disaster that tarnished the careers of all concerned. Critic Vincent Canby in his negative The New York Times review on May 8, 1981, opined, "[t]he film's one bright spot is Barbara Harris, who plays Dinette as sincerely as possible under awful conditions. She looks great even when she's supposed to be tacky and is genuinely funny as she tries to make sense out of Loyal's muddled philosophizing, which, of course, the screenplay requires her to match."

Harris was offscreen until 1986 when she played the mother of Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married. Her last films were Nice Girls Don't Explode (1987), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). Harris retired from acting and began teaching. When asked in 2002 if she would resume her acting career, she said, "Well, if someone handed me something fantastic for $10 million, I'd work again. But I haven't worked in a long time as an actor. I don't miss it. 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, 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. It wasn't as interesting." Harris died of lung cancer in Scottsdale, Arizona on August 21, 2018, aged 83.