Julie Harris, 1925–2013

Although Julie Harris was familiar to TV and film audiences, the stage was the love of her life, and its center. Often hailed as the first lady of American theater, Harris rarely stopped treading the boards, happily suffering the discomforts of touring the country between her many award-winning runs on Broadway. Shortly after her 70th birthday, she was asked what she’d do if she were told the world would end tomorrow. “I’d go to the theater,” she said.

Harris was born in the affluent Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., to an investment banker father and a socialite mother, said The New York Times. Harris’s mother wanted her daughter to become a debutante, but the aspiring actress was far more interested in movies, school plays, and summer acting camps. Manning Gurian, the second of Harris’s three husbands, once said that acting was her form of rebellion against her mother. “Julie was a great disappointment to her,” he said. “She wasn’t pretty, didn’t wear the right clothes, couldn’t find dates…. As a defense, Julie escaped into acting. As an actress she could be anyone she wanted to, and her mother couldn’t stop her.”

Harris began acting on Broadway while studying at the Yale School of Drama, and “became a star” in 1950 playing Frankie, the “embodiment of adolescent loneliness” in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, said NewYorker.com. She was nominated for an Oscar for playing the same role in the film version two years later, and was subsequently cast opposite James Dean in East of Eden. The producer had originally thought her too plain for the role, but director Elia Kazan later credited Harris with taming her famously rebellious co-star. “She was goodness itself with Dean, kind and patient and everlastingly sympathetic,” said Kazan. “She helped Jimmy more than I did with any direction I gave him.”

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It was on the Great White Way that Harris established “a career of durability, longevity, and versatility,” said The Washington Post. She won the first of a record six Tony Awards playing Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, the play based on Christopher Isherwood’s stories from Weimar-era Berlin, which would go on to be the basis for the musical Cabaret. She also won Tonys playing Joan of Arc in 1955, a divorcée with a college-aged lover in 1968, Mary Todd Lincoln in 1972, and the poet Emily Dickinson in the one-woman show The Belle of Amherst in 1976. She was honored with a lifetime Tony Award for her Broadway career in 2002.

“My mother used to say to me, ‘But you’re so dramatic,’” Harris once recalled. “Yes, I’d say, that’s what I’m supposed to be. Life is dramatic, all the time, much more than the stage.”