Barbara Harris

Barbara Harris (July 25, 1935 – August 21, 2018) was an American actress born in Evanston, Illinois, to Natalie Harris, a pianist, and Oscar Graham Harris, an arborist who later became a businessman. The youngest of four children, she attended Senn High School and Wilbur Wright College before beginning her stage career as a teenager at the Playwrights Theatre in Chicago, where her fellow players included Edward Asner, Elaine May, and Mike Nichols. She went on to win the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1967 and earned an Academy Award nomination for her film work.

Harris became a member of the Compass Players, the first ongoing improvisational theatre troupe in the United States, directed by Paul Sills, to whom she was married at the time. When the Compass Players disbanded, Sills founded The Second City in Chicago in 1959. Though Harris and Sills had divorced by then, he cast her in the company and brought the troupe to New York for a Broadway engagement at the Royale Theatre. That production, From the Second City, opened on September 26, 1961, and ran through December 9, 1961. Also featuring Alan Arkin and Paul Sand, the revue was produced by Max Liebman and directed by Sills, and presented Harris in sketches including Caesar's Wife, First Affair, Museum Piece, and The Bergman Film. The engagement earned Harris her first Tony Award nomination, for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical, as well as the Theatre World Award in 1962. She is a life member of the Actors Studio.

Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner approached Harris after seeing her in From the Second City, expressing their intention to write a musical for her. While that project developed, she appeared on Broadway in Arthur Kopit's dark comedic farce Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, for which she also won the Theatre World Award. In 1963, she appeared alongside Anne Bancroft in a production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children at the Martin Beck Theater, staged by Jerome Robbins, which received five Tony nominations.

The Lerner project eventually materialized as On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, with music by Burton Lane. Harris starred as Daisy Gamble, a New Yorker who consults a psychiatrist to help her stop smoking and, under hypnosis, reveals that she has lived multiple past lives. The show opened on October 14, 1965, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and ran for 280 performances, earning three Tony nominations in total. Harris performed numbers from the production alongside John Cullum on The Bell Telephone Hour in a broadcast titled "The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner," which aired on February 27, 1966. Her performance earned her a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical.

Harris next starred in The Apple Tree, a musical created for her by composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick, directed by Mike Nichols. The show opened at the Shubert Theater on October 5, 1966, and closed on November 25, 1967. Co-starring Alan Alda and Larry Blyden, the production was structured around three tales by Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton, and Jules Feiffer, and Harris appeared in all three segments. She played Eve in Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve, a temptress in The Lady, or the Tiger?, and two distinct roles in Feiffer's Passionella — a soot-covered chimney sweep and the glamorous movie star the character transforms into. The performance won Harris the 1967 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, as well as Cue Magazine's Entertainer of the Year award.

In 1969, Harris directed a Broadway production of The Penny Wars by Elliott Baker, starring Kim Hunter, George Voskovec, and Kristoffer Tabori. Her final stage appearance was in the off-Broadway first American production of Brecht and Weill's Mahagonny in 1970, in which she played Jenny, a role originally created by Lotte Lenya.

Harris's screen career began with guest appearances on television series including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Naked City, Channing, and The Defenders between 1961 and 1964. Her feature film debut came in 1965 in A Thousand Clowns, in which she played social worker Sandra Markowitz opposite Jason Robards Jr., earning both of them Golden Globe Award nominations. She subsequently appeared in the film adaptation of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1967) with Rosalind Russell and Robert Morse. Her performance in the 1971 film Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, which co-starred Dustin Hoffman and featured a script by Herb Gardner, earned her an Academy Award nomination. She also appeared in Neil Simon's Plaza Suite (1971) with Walter Matthau and The War Between Men and Women (1972) with Jack Lemmon.