Acting is my life she announced to her high school drama teacher and indeed she never changed her mind, not for a moment. Acting is always an adventure, she said after electrifying New York audiences for years, a struggle and a quest to find the truth. It's wanting to do it right... that's where the fear comes in... but who can say what's right? We're very delicate creatures, aren't we? She would say it wasn't the applause she was seeking but being able to fully flesh out a character.
She was born in 1925 in tony Grosse Point Park, Michigan, to an investment banker father and a socialite mother who was a former nurse. She rebelled against her mother's demands that she become a debutante. Harris' second husband would say Julie was a great disappointment to her (mother). 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 be and her mother couldn't stop her.
While attending a Rhode Island finishing school she persuaded her parents to allow her to enroll in a Manhattan girls' prep school which offered drama. She went to Colorado to take part in a performing arts school and camp. She studied at the Yale School of Drama and became one of the first members of the esteemed Actor's Studio. While at Yale she appeared in her first Broadway play.
She married a fellow stage actor, Jay Julien, in 1946 while she was apprenticing on Broadway doing just about anything that came her way. She was enormously dedicated to her craft, far more than she was to the marriage.
In 1950 director Harold Clurman, whom she knew from The Actor's Studio, hired her to star in the Broadway production of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding as 12-year old Frankie, an ultra-sensitive, overly-imaginative, self-tormenting, Georgian tomboy who is longing to be at her brother's wedding and then live with him. Audiences were gobsmacked by her performance particularly since the actress was 24 years old.
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| Huddling with director Fred Zinnemann on Member of the Wedding |
Everyone then and forever more spoke of Harris' range and power on the stage, whereas in films she had a tendency to play shy, withdrawn, if not frequently neurotic characters. She and Wedding cast members Ethel Waters, as the family cook and mentor, and Brandon de Wilde, as a cousin, were all hired for the screen version in 1952. Director Fred Zinnemann insisted on it. It was Harris' movie debut resulting in her only Oscar nomination.
She knew director Elia Kazan and James Dean from The Actor's Studio and she was thrilled to be given the role of Abra (and star billing) in John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1954). The story of brotherly rivalry has Abra at the center as she leaves one brother for another. Kazan thought she was brilliant and was always grateful for her presence since she worked so closely with the erratic Dean. The two actors dearly loved one another as friends.
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| Harris and James Dean were great pals |
In 1955 she filmed I Am a Camera playing Sally Bowles opposite Laurence Harvey. It was taken from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and 20 years later turned into the musical Cabaret. It was the second time she would play a role she had played on Broadway, a most unusual occurrence, but one that says a great deal about how people felt about the youthful Harris. She won her first Tony in 1952 for this role.
These first three movie roles were the best of her cinematic career and they are the reason why I chose to include her in my tribute to the fifties. As good as they were, however, she returned to the stage in such plays as The Lark, The Country Wife, The Warm Peninsula, Little Moon over Alban and A Shot in the Dark.
She repeated her performances in The Lark and Little Moon for television. She always yearned for wider audiences to see her Broadway performances so she took some of her plays on the road and also did some on television. Other TV work included acclaimed productions of Johnny Belinda, A Doll's House, The Heiress, Victoria Regina and Pygmalion.
On the screen she joined Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney for Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) playing a sympathetic although manipulative social worker. I thought she was miscast and that the whole production, despite the weighty names attached to it, was not as good as it should have been.
The Haunting (1963) showcased her as a spinster beset by evil spirits in a big ol' house. It was somewhat acclaimed as a great horror piece which I never understood but watching her and Claire Bloom was a joy.
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| As a drug addict in Harper |
I guess I don't understand why she signed on for the detective yarn Harper (1966) although I liked the film and her in it. She plays a drug-addicted nightclub singer and the role seemed beneath her. Perhaps she was pleased to be part of a glittering cast that included old pals from The Actor's Studio, Paul Newman and Shelley Winters, along with Janet Leigh, Robert Wagner and Lauren Bacall. Or maybe it's because she was pleased she'd be looking more glamorous than she usually did. Or maybe like a lot of Broadway stars, she did occasional movies for the big bucks.
You're a Big Boy Now (1966) is a quirky flick, perhaps too quirky. Harris played Miss Thing, the landlady of an innocent guy who moves to New York to get a glimpse of life away from his overbearing parents. It was great seeing Harris and Geraldine Page (similar actresses in a number of ways) in the same film.
After East of Eden, my favorite Harris role is in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). It's such a weird thing but I was pulled into it for several reasons, Harris being one of them. Based on another Carson McCullers' novel, it takes place on an army base and its main plot concerns a sexually-frustrated army major (Marlon Brando) and his obsession with a hunky private (Robert Forster). The private, in turn, lusts after the major's wife (Elizabeth Taylor) who is having an affair with a married officer (Brian Keith). Harris plays Keith's mentally ill wife who is under the mesmerizing control of her fey houseboy, Anacleto (Zorro David). Their relationship completely fascinated me.
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| I wonder what Harris thought of Taylor |
She had been friends with Brando since Actor's Studio days and was happy to see him again but she never understood his disrespect for acting. He badmouthed it something fierce and she could barely tolerate it. As it always had been, acting was everything to her.
After Reflections, Harris returned to the stage and enjoyed a very successful two-year run in the comedy 40 Carats. This time she didn't score the film role.
The 1970s might have been her most celebrated decade but not in the movies. She electrified Broadway in 1972's The Last of Mrs. Lincoln and especially in the 1976 one-woman performance in The Belle of Amherst as poetess Emily Dickensen. Tonys all around, thank you. Today she is most revered for Belle over all her magnificent work. I saw the TV adaptations of both and consider Belle to be among the 10 best acting jobs I've ever encountered.
She also made some other TV movies in the 70s that I so enjoyed... House on Greenapple Road, How Awful About Allan, Home for the Holidays and Backstairs at the White House.... good TV flicks that were made better by her participation. She also starred in two series of her own but neither made it.
She starred as one of two sisters who hide Jews during WWII in the independent The Hiding Place (1975). It would be her last leading movie role in a good film. The following year she made Voyage of the Damned (1976), joining an all-star cast that included Faye Dunaway, Ben Gazzara, James Mason, Maria Schell, Orson Welles and Oskar Werner. It is a sad, true story of the 1939 voyage of German-Jewish refugees with no country willing to take them in.
In 1980 she made one of the oddest career choices ever. She joined the soap opera Knot's Landing (as a former singer) and stayed with the series for an astonishing seven years. I can't believe I'm typing this paragraph. Needless to say, gazillions more became aware of who she was.
She had a small role as a friend of Dian Fossey's in Gorillas in the Mist (1988) and four years later played Steve Martin's mother in HouseSitter. The latter is, I believe, the only work of hers in the 1990's that I've heard of and yet she worked a fair amount in that decade. I suspect they were all indistinguishable projects although I have no doubt she brought her A game to each of them.
On the stage she continued to wow 'em in plays including Driving Miss Daisy, Lettice and Lovage, Lucifer's Child, The Glass Menagerie, On Golden Pond and The Gin Game.
She tied with Chita Riviera for the most Tony nominations at 10 and for a couple of decades she won the most competitive Tonys at five although Angela Lansbury later tied with her and Audra McDonald one day bested them both. Harris was nominated for an astonishing 11 Emmy nominations and won three.
In 2002 she was awarded a life achievement award from the Tony folks. In 2005, along with Tony Bennett, Suzanne Farrell, Robert Redford and Tina Turner, Harris was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.
She was married three times and had a son by her second husband.
She was a breast cancer survivor, she suffered a severe fall for which extensive surgery was required, she suffered a stroke in 2001 and a second, more serious one in 2010. She happily lived for many years on Cape Cod and died there in 2013 of congestive heart failure. Julie Harris was 87 years old.
I wonder if her mother ever appreciated her. Her Knot's Landing costar, Alec Baldwin, certainly did. He would say in a tribute to the reserved, red-haired actress of sharp intelligence... Her voice was like rainfall. Her eyes connected directly to and channeled the depths of her powerful and tender heart. Her talent, a gift from God.
How fitting.
Next posting:
A good 50's film
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