Award-winning Hollywood actress Barbara Harris, 83

Barbara Harris, who died on Tuesday aged 83, was an American actress who appeared in hit movies such as Freaky Friday and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and also won widespread critical acclaim.

She won a Tony Award, was nominated for an Academy Award and received four Golden Globe Award nominations during a stellar career.

Born in Evanston, Illinois, she started out on stage as a teenager at the Playwright’s Theatre in Chicago. She was nominated for a 1966 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965) and gave another well-received performance in the Apple Tree, a Broadway musical created for her, in which she co-starred with Alan Alda and Larry Blyden.

It would be her last stage role, except for the off-Broadway first American production of Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny in 1970, and from 1961 to 1964 she appeared as a guest star on television series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Naked City, Channing and The Defenders.

In 1965 she made her feature film debut as social worker Sandra Markowitz in the screen version of A Thousand Clowns and won a Golden Globe nomination.

She appeared opposite Walter Matthau in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite and Jack Lemmon in The War Between Men and Women and earned an Oscar nomination for the 1971 film (which co-starred Dustin Hoffman) Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? In 1975, Harris appeared in one of her signature film roles in Robert Altman’s Nashville, playing country singer Albuquerque and collecting one of the film’s 11 Golden Globe nominations.

The following year, Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Family Plot as a bogus spiritualist.

Harris continued to appear in films in the ’70s and ’80s, including Freaky Friday with a young Jodie Foster, the Seduction Of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep and Peggy Sue Got Married with Kathleen Turner. Her last films were Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Grosse Pointe Blank.

She became a teacher after retiring from acting and insisted she did not miss the limelight, although she resurfaced briefly in 2005 in a Radio Repertory Company of America audio drama.

Actress Barbara Harris.