Celebrity Biographies
Barbara Harris
She played psychic Blanche Tyler, hired to search for a young heir who was abandoned at birth, in “The Plot,” the latest work by the illustrious Alfred Hitchcock. Actress Barbara Harris passed away on August 21, 2018, at the age of 83, as a result of cancer, in Scottsdale (Arizona).
Born on July 25, 1935 in Evanston, Illinois, Barbara Densmoor Harris was the son of a pianist and a surgeon. She began her journey in Chicago theaters, but given the good reviews she decided to move to New York to try her luck in the first division: Broadway. Her move worked out for her, because in 1967 she received the Tony for Best Musical Actress for “The Apple Tree.” After acting as a secondary in various series, she made her film debut with the romantic The Clown of the City , where she played a social worker who falls in love with a writer ( Jason Robards ). She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Role for Who Is Harry Kellerman?, where she played an actress having an affair with a songwriter ( Dustin Hoffman ).
She played one of her best-remembered characters, the aspiring singer Albuquerque, who is on the run from her irate husband, in Robert Altman ‘s ensemble film Nashville . But he will forever be remembered by moviegoers for The Plot , for which he earned a Golden Globe nomination. “I was a little intimidated when Alfred Hitchcock asked me to work with him, but he turned out to be a wonderful person.” commented in an interview.
Following the iconic tape was a woman who inexplicably swapped her mind with her daughter (a young but already highly experienced Jodie Foster ), in Crazy Friday . Withdrawn from the screen, she returned sporadically, for example to play the mother of the protagonist, Kathleen Turner , in Peggy Sue she married , by Francis Ford Coppola . She said goodbye to playing John Cusack ‘s mother in 1997’s A Killer Something Special .
In American drama schools, Barbara Harris is considered one of the great pioneers in the field of improvisation. Scenes that she developed on the fly with Alan Arkin and other colleagues from the Second City and Compass company, of which she was a part early in her career, are studied. In this formation she fell in love with Paul Sills, a theater director with whom she married in 1955, although she divorced three years later. For the rest, she was quite discreet regarding her personal relationships. “Actors should be judged only by their jobs, not by their private lives,” she stated in an interview.