Actress known for Freaky Friday and Grosse Point Blank
Born: July 25, 1935;
Died: August 21, 2018
BARBARA Harris, who has died aged 83, was an American actor who maintained a career of quality and versatility over nearly five decades. A Tony Award-winning theatre performer in the 1960s with a pioneering reputation for improvisation, the recognition this award brought helped her move into television and eventually film. Her film debut came in 1965, appearing with Jason Robards in the Broadway musical adaptation A Thousand Clowns, for which she received her first of four Golden Globe nominations.
Over the next four decades, other high-profile roles arrived with Robert Altman’s musical comedy satire Nashville (1975); as the mother of Jodie Foster’s teenager – with whom her character switches minds – in the Disney family comedy Freaky Friday (1976); in Francis Ford Coppola’s nostalgic Peggy Sue Got Married (1986); and alongside Steve Martin and Michael Caine in Frank Oz’ conman caper Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988).
Her final film part was as the dementia-suffering elderly mother of John Cusack’s hitman in Grosse Point Blank (1997), after which Harris retired from acting.
Other now less well-known entries were significant for other reasons. She appeared alongside Dustin Hoffman and was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress in Ulu Grosbard’s Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971), and worked with greats including Neil Simon and Walter Matthau on Plaza Suite in 1971 and Alfred Hitchcock on his final film, 1976’s Family Plot.
Born Barbara Densmoor Harris in Evanston, Illinois in 1935 to parents Natalie and Oscar, Harris began acting as a teenager at the Playwrights Theatre in Chicago. She became a member of the pioneering improvisational theatre group the Compass Players; the group was in existence between 1955 and 1958, during which period Harris was married to its director Paul Sills.
Despite their divorce, Harris and Sills were both involved in founding the group which followed Compass, the theatre company and venue The Second City. The company still exists and has helped launch the careers of comedy actors including Bill Murray and Tina Fey, and in 1961 it did the same for Harris when the revue From the Second City arrived on Broadway and earned a Tony nomination. Harris had no Broadway ambitions, however, and was one of the minority of company members who voted against taking the show to New York; yet she decided to stick around when the esteemed composer Richard Rodgers and the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner pledged to write a show just for her.
That musical, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, appeared in 1965 and earned her a Tony nomination. The following year she starred in The Apple Tree, directed by Nichols, which cemented the peak of her Broadway renown and won her Tony award.
Following her retirement Harris moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where she became an acting teacher.
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