#WomenWeLove: Actor, Barbara Harris

Barbara Harris (1935-2018) had an unusual film career, she took long breaks, sometimes very long ones, a few were even voluntary. Her offbeat persona, comedic talents, and nontraditional beauty were never quite enough to make her a major star, and she struggled to find work that suited her. She reminds me a bit of Madeline Kahn, another comic great who enjoyed a long stage career interspersed with some memorable film roles. Unlike Kahn, Harris did not have Mel Brooks writing roles for her.

Harris was one of the co-founders of the famed Second City comedy troupe. She received a Tony Award nomination for her Broadway debut in the revue From The Second City (1962), and she finally won a Tony for her performance in the great little musical The Apple Tree (1966). She won a 1962 Theatre World Award for Arthur Kopit‘s dark farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You In The Closet And I’m Feelin’ So Sad Off-Broadway, and then she repeated the role in the 1967 film adaptation. She earned another Tony nomination for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), in a role written especially for her.

Harris was dating Warren Beatty during the run of The Apple Tree, and he had the gall to dump her just hours before she won the Tony. He still went as her date, but at the awards, she was visibly shaking, and slurring her acceptance speech after washing down some Valiums with champagne.

Harris shifted easily between comedy, musicals, and drama, from kooky to serious, in films and theatre. She was a reluctant star who disliked fame, chose films she thought would fail, and preferred not to be recognized. Harris:

“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.”

She was delightfully ditzy in films such as A Thousand Clowns (1965). She was Oscar-nominated for Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971); she was Alfred Hitchcock‘s last leading lady in Family Plot (1976), and Kathleen Turner‘s mother in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

Now, Harris is probably best known for paying baby lesbian Jodie Foster‘s mother in the delightful Freaky Friday (1976), but my favorite Harris film performance has to be her work in Robert Altman‘s Nashville (1975), a performance that she mostly improvised. Her portrayal of a runaway wife who sings It Don’t Worry Me to a frightened crowd after the shooting of an outsider, populist presidential candidate in film’s closing minutes is chillingly unforgettable and heartbreaking.

She made the delightful double-bill movie, Movie Movie, for director Stanley Donen (what happened to this film, it seems to have disappeared?), and she co-starred in The Seduction Of Joe Tynan (1979) with her former Broadway leading man, Alan Alda about of a liberal Washington Senator caught in an affair with a younger woman, played by a mostly unknown Meryl Streep.

She starred in Second-Hand Hearts (1981) for the great director Hal Ashby, playing a would-be singer who marries a carwash worker to get back her children from their paternal grandparents. The film was a critical dud and box-office disaster that all but ruined the careers of all concerned, but Harris still got good reviews. She then disappeared for five years, until Francis Ford Coppola asked for her for Peggy Sue Got Married. Her last films are Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), both with Harris in small roles.

After that, Harris gave up acting and started teaching. In 2002, she told an interviewer: “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 (she married him), 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.”

A longtime cigarette smoker, in 2018, Harris was taken by lung cancer at 83 years old. Today, July 25th, she would have been celebrating her 88th birthday.