Harriet Harris

Harriet Sansom Harris, born January 8, 1955, in Fort Worth, Texas, is an American actress whose career spans Broadway, television, and film. One of three children, Harris attended Fort Worth Country Day School, graduating in 1973, and Arlington Heights High School. At seventeen she was accepted into the Juilliard School's Drama Division, where she studied from 1973 to 1977 as part of Group 6 and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Following graduation, she spent three years with John Houseman's touring repertory company The Acting Company, performing in productions of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Antigone, and Mother Courage and Her Children.

Harris built her early career through extensive work on and Off-Broadway. In 1989 she appeared at Second Stage Theatre in What a Man Weighs, and she later joined the original cast of Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey as its sole female cast member. Her 1992 Broadway debut came in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun. That same year she received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her Off-Broadway portrayal in Bella, Belle of Byelorussia, followed by a second Drama Desk nomination in 1993 for Jeffrey. Her Broadway work between 1992 and 2015 included roles in Old Acquaintance, Cry-Baby, Cinderella, It Shoulda Been You, and the comedy Present Laughter, among other productions.

The peak of her Broadway recognition came in 2002, when Harris won both the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Mrs. Meers in Thoroughly Modern Millie. In summer 2007 she appeared on Broadway in the revival of John Van Druten's comedy Old Acquaintance, playing Mildred Watson Drake alongside Margaret Colin at the American Airlines Theatre. She then joined the Broadway cast of Cry-Baby, based on the John Waters film, which previewed at the Marquis Theatre on March 15, 2008, opened on April 24, and closed on June 22, 2008; the production received a Tony Award nomination for Best Musical. Harris returned to Broadway in 2013 as the Evil Stepmother in Cinderella, and in 2015 she appeared in It Shoulda Been You, playing the mother of the groom opposite Tyne Daly as the mother of the bride. Beyond Broadway, her stage work has included playing Vera Charles in the Kennedy Center's production of Mame opposite Christine Baranski in 2006, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie at the Guthrie Theater in early 2007, and Fanny in The Royal Family of Broadway at Barrington Stage Company in Massachusetts from June to July 2018.

On television, Harris is widely recognized for two recurring roles. From 1993 to 2004 she played Bebe Glazer, Frasier Crane's conniving agent, on the NBC sitcom Frasier, a role she reprised in Paramount's Frasier reboot in 2024. In 2004 she joined the cast of ABC's Desperate Housewives as Felicia Tilman, Martha Huber's sister, returning for the second season in 2005 and again for the seventh season. Among her notable guest appearances was the 1993 X-Files episode "Eve," in which she played Dr. Sally Kendrick and her clones — a performance praised by series creator Chris Carter and Entertainment Weekly, and one that inspired the name of the band Eve 6. She also appeared in the short-lived series The 5 Mrs. Buchanans, Union Square, The Beast, and It's All Relative, and had guest roles on Ghost Whisperer, Murphy Brown, Ally McBeal, Six Feet Under, and Ellen. In 2006 she starred as Margaret Milne in the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries The Lost Room. Later television credits include the American Horror Story: Apocalypse episode "Sojourn" and the Dynasty episode "Queen of Cups" in 2018, the Netflix drama Ratched in 2020, and the drama series The Agency, in which she played Dr. Rachel Blake.

Harris's film work includes appearances in Memento, Addams Family Values, Nurse Betty, and Phantom Thread. On her mother's side, she is a descendant of a brother of Marion Sansom, a twentieth-century rancher and civic leader after whom Sansom Park is named.