Julian Barry

Julian Barry, born Julian Barry Mendelsohn Jr. on December 24, 1930, in New York City, was an American playwright, screenwriter, and Broadway performer who died on July 25, 2023, in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 92, from complications of heart failure and kidney disease. The only child of Julian B. and Grace (née Fein) Mendelsohn, he grew up in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. As a teenager he played saxophone in his high school band and made regular trips to jazz clubs in New York City, where he heard performances by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane.

Barry studied drama at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, where his fellow performers included comedian Jerry Stiller. His education was interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, in which he served until 1953. He returned to New York and in 1955 was cast in Orson Welles's production of King Lear at New York City Center. His Broadway activity between 1956 and 1957 included the drama Compulsion and the musical Shinbone Alley, on which he also served as stage manager. He additionally stage managed the Budd Schulberg adaptation The Disenchanted, about the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with seven other Broadway productions, continuing in that dual capacity as actor and stage manager through the mid-1960s before transitioning to full-time writing.

In 1969, Columbia Pictures hired Barry to write a screenplay about comedian Lenny Bruce. When the commercial climate shifted toward romantic films following the success of Love Story, Barry proposed to theater director Tom O'Horgan that the material be reworked as a stage play. The resulting production was a hit, starring Cliff Gorman. The play was subsequently adapted into a 1974 film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine. At the 47th Academy Awards, the film received nominations in all five categories constituting the Oscar Grand Slam, among approximately 40 films ever to achieve that distinction. Barry received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and was also nominated that year for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium. His directorial work on the Chicago stage production of Lenny earned him a nomination for a Joseph Jefferson Award.

Barry's subsequent screenwriting credits included The River, Eyes of Laura Mars, Rhinoceros, Me, Myself and I, and A Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, produced for PBS's American Playhouse. In 1983 he wrote the book for Jean Seberg, a musical biography of the American actress and political activist, directed by Peter Hall at London's National Theatre with music by Marvin Hamlisch. He later co-wrote the opera Born Again with Peter Hall, which was staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre in England with Mandy Patinkin and José Ferrer. Barry also wrote the libretto for Zyklon, an opera centered on the life of German-Jewish scientist Fritz Haber, with music composed by British composer Peter King. In 1999 he received Drama Logue Awards in Los Angeles for both writing and directing the play The Reunification Hotel. He appeared as himself in the documentary Pablo, about graphic artist and film director Pablo Ferro. His autobiography, My Night with Orson, was published on July 9, 2011, by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Barry met his second wife, Patricia Foley, when he cast her as Sister Sarah Brown opposite Tony Bennett in a Chicago production of Guys and Dolls. They married three weeks later and had three children: Sally, Michael, and Jennifer. Patricia died in November 1981 in a car accident. Barry subsequently married film producer Laura Ziskin, with whom he had a daughter, Julia, born in 1983; that marriage ended in divorce. Ziskin died in 2011.