Barbara Harris, scenestealing actress of screen and stage, dies at 83
BEFORE Barbara Harris won a Tony Award, ran away with the final scene of Robert Altman’s ‘ Nashville’ or starred in the original body- switch comedy ‘ Freaky Friday,’” she was an inquisitive Chicago teenager struck by a construction project on the same block as her home, where an old Chinese restaurant was being converted into a theatre.
That, at least, was how director Mike Nichols remembered it.
“When we were painting and building it, one day a young girl wandered in – because she lived on the block – and asked what we were doing. ‘We’re going to have a theatre,’ we said. ‘ Do you want to be in it?’ She replied, ‘OK.’”
Harris, Nichols told Life magazine in 1966, “handled the mimeographing machine” for months before working as an actor in the troupe, a group of improvisational performers that evolved into the nationally recognised comedy group Second City.
“I once asked her if she thought she would have become an actress if the theatre hadn’t been on the block,” Nichols said. “She said she didn’t know.”
Harris, who died Aug 21 at 83, a hospice centre in Scottsdale, Arizona, went on to perform the very first scene in a Second City production. A master at playing comic, neurotic characters, she was also a talented vocalist who drew comparisons to Judy Holliday, the versatile comedian-actress-singer.
Her characters were often artistic strivers, aspiring actresses and singers whose ambitions far exceeded their talents. For ‘ The Apple Tree,’ a Nichols- directed musical that earned Harris a best- actress Tony in 1967, she played a sootstained chimney sweep who dreams of becoming a movie star, despite having a comically bad singing voice.
In “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?” ( 1971), starring Dustin Hoffman, Harris received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress – largely, critics said, on the strength of a single scene in which her actress character breaks down during an audition.
“I feel like I just auditioned for the part of a human being and I didn’t get the job,” she says, while insisting her hand is stuck to a stage lamp and won’t come off.
In perhaps her most memorable performance, she dominated what movie critic Roger Ebert described as the ‘ unforgettable and heartbreaking’ final moments of ‘ Nashville’ ( 1975), singing the song ‘ It Don’t Worry Me’ before a concert audience that has just witnessed an attempted assassination.
Barbara Densmoor Harris was born in Evanston, Illinois, on July 25, 1935. Her mother was a piano teacher, and her father worked as a tree surgeon and restaurateur, among other jobs.
Around the time she graduated from high school in Chicago, Harris joined the Playwrights Theatre Club, which evolved into the Compass Players and then Second City. In the late 1950s, she was married to Paul Sills, the group’s co-founder.
A cousin, Mary Lynn Fisher, said Ms. Harris had lung cancer that metastasized into bone cancer and leaves no immediate survivors. — WP-Bloomberg