NEW YORK – Julie Harris, one of Broadway’s most honoured performers, whose roles ranged from the flamboyant Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera to the reclusive Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, died Saturday. She was 87.
Harris died at her West Chatham, Mass., home of congestive heart failure, actress and family friend Francesca James said.
Harris won five Tony Awards for best actress in a play, displaying a virtuosity that enabled her to portray an astonishing gallery of women during a theatre career that spanned almost 60 years and included such plays as The Member of the Wedding (1950), The Lark (1955), Forty Carats (1968) and The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1972).
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She was honoured again with a sixth Tony, a special lifetime achievement award in 2002. Her record is up against Audra McDonald, with five competitive Tonys, and Angela Lansbury with four Tonys in the best actress-musical category and one for best supporting actress in a play.
Harris had suffered a stroke in 2001 while she was in Chicago appearing in a production of Claudia Allen’s Fossils. She suffered another stroke in 2010, James said.
“I’m still in sort of a place of shock,” said James, who appeared in daytime soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live.
“She was, really, the greatest influence in my life,” said James, who had known Harris for about 50 years.
Television viewers knew Harris as the free-spirited Lilimae Clements on the prime-time soap opera Knots Landing. In the movies, she was James Dean’s romantic co-star in East of Eden (1955), and had rolls in such films as Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), The Haunting (1963) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967).
Yet Harris’ biggest successes and most satisfying moments have been on stage. “The theatre has been my church,” the actress once said. “I don’t hesitate to say that I found God in the theatre.”
Harris was married three times, to lawyer Jay I. Julian, stage manager Manning Gurian and writer William Erwin Carroll. She had one son, Peter Alston Gurian.
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