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Actress, born
in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, December 2, 1925
 Julie
Harris is widely regarded as the most respected and
honored stage actress in America. Playwrights have
created roles for her, critics have lavished praise
on her, audiences have adored her in the theater, in
the movies, on television. For decades, her awards
for her stage performances in I Am a Camera
(1952), The Lark (1956), Forty Carats
(1969), The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1973) and
The Belle of Amherst (1977), gave her the
distinction of winning more Tony Awards than any
other performer. Her 10 nominations were likewise
unequalled. Then in 2002, she was honored with yet
another Tony, The Lifetime Achievement Award, securing her place in the record books for decades
to come.
Most tellingly, her greatest fans have been the
playwrights and directors who have witnessed the
miracle of a Julie Harris performance from the
inside out. Harold Clurman, who directed her
breakthrough performance in the stage version of
The Member of the Wedding, described her as "a
nun whose church is the stage." Elia Kazan, her
director on the film East of Eden, called her
"an angel…kind and patient and everlastingly
sympathetic." James Prideaux, who wrote The Last
of Mrs. Lincoln for her, called her "a bride of
the theater." The playwright Donald Freed, author of
The Countess, in which she portrayed
Tolstoy's wife, said: "No matter what character she
plays, there is something transcendent about her
performance. And no matter how transcendent, there
is also something poignantly human."
Indeed for more than half a century, Julie Harris
has been recognized as the soul of the American
theater. She is that rare artist who has devoted her
life to the stage—on Broadway and off, and in
theaters, large and small, throughout the nation.
She says she knew she would do so from the very
beginning: "The Stage!' I knew it was where I wanted
to be. I loved it all. It became this great source
of nourishment, spiritual nourishment, for me. I
found everything in life there."
 Born
in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Harris was introduced to
the theater by her parents who regularly took her
into Detroit on weekend afternoons the see the
Broadway plays and players coming through town on
national tours. At 20, she made her own Broadway
debut in a comedy seemingly named to describe her
talent: It's a Gift. It ran just over a
month, and for five more years she tried to get
noticed in a variety of Broadway productions that
included revivals of Shakespeare and Synge, and new
plays now long forgotten. But in 1950 she opened in
the stage adaptation of Carson McCullers' The
Member of the Wedding. She was 24, and spent
more than a year playing a 12-year-old, and her
success was absolute. Brooks Atkinson wrote in the
New York Times: "Julie Harris gives an
extraordinary performance—vibrant, full of anguish
and elation." Suddenly she was a star on Broadway.
In 1952, she also played the part in the film
version, was nominated for an Oscar and became a
household name across America. Her next stage outing
back in New York was equally brilliant. As the first
Sally Bowles, in John van Druten's I Am a Camera,
she won her first Tony Award. Not surprising.
She startled theatergoers with her miraculous
transformation, going from precocious Southern
tomboy one season to desperate Berlin cabaret singer
the next.
Throughout the next two decades, Broadway was her
playground and her home, and that astonishing
versatility she displayed early on would become one
of the hallmarks of her career. Rare is the actress
who can triumph in one-woman shows, Restoration
comedy, French farce, light comedy, historical drama
and even a musical. Her vacations from Broadway
found her playing the great classical roles
(including Juliet and Ophelia) at Stratford in
Canada and the New York Shakespeare festivals.
 Harris
has also made a career of bringing to the stage the
lives of historical women, building over the years a
rich gallery filled with luminous portraits,
exciting in their boldness, often heartbreaking in
their vulnerability: Joan of Arc, Mary Todd Lincoln,
Isak Dinesen, Florence Nightingale, Nora Joyce (wife
of James), Dora Carrington (of Bloomsbury fame),
Fanny Osbourne (wife of Robert Louis Stevenson), the
actress June Havoc, Queen Victoria (on television),
and perhaps most famously, Emily Dickinson in her
one-woman hit, The Belle of Amherst.
Some of her best work has also been for television
and theatrical films. In the movies, she followed
her Oscar for The Member of the Wedding , by
appearing opposite James Dean in East of Eden
, bringing her Sally Bowles to the screen, and
working not often, but colorfully in, among others,
Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Haunting, Harper,
You're a Big Boy Now, Reflections in a Golden Eye,
The Hiding Place, The Bell Jar and Gorillas
in the Mist. On television she played Ibsen (A
Doll's House), Shaw Pygmalion) and
Shakespeare (Hamlet); and, for seven wildly
convoluted years, in a little California cul-se-sac
known as "Knots Landing," where she portrayed the
eccentric audience favorite Lillimae Clements from
1981-87.
Television may have brought her the widest fame, but
the stage always gave her the most intense joy and
once her job on the prime time soap opera was over,
she returned to the theater with a vengeance. She
toured the country in Driving Miss Daisy and
The Gin Game and starred in a revival of
The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. She continues to commission plays from
playwrights and to appear in venues huge and small,
because, as she says, "What is thrilling about the
theater is that it's a forum where people come and
for those two or three hours belong to something, to
ideas, to a feeling of being a member of the human
race."
"I want to touch people with the meaning of life,"
she adds. And she has.
(Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts) |
