Barbara Barrie, the vivacious actress who starred in the heartbreaking interracial drama One potato, two potatoes and earned an Oscar nomination for playing the supportive mother in Break awaydied Wednesday. She was 95 years old.
Barrie died at her home in Manhattan, The New York Times reported. Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told the newspaper that she suffered from terminal cancer and that her death was medically assisted.
Barrie also played Sarah, a dieting glutton, the wife of a man with a drinking problem (Charles Kimbrough), in the original 1970–1972 production of Stephen Sondheim’s film. Businessand she received one of a then-record 14 Tony nominations for historical musical comedy.
A veteran of the stage, she also appeared in the early Broadway runs of Neil Simon’s film. The Prisoner of Second Avenue And Californian Suitein Harvey Fierstein Trilogy of the torch song and, most recently, as a Jewish bubbe in Joshua Harmon’s 2017 film. My other half.
Lovers of Barney Miller You know Barrie for playing the wife of a Greenwich Village police station captain (Hal Linden) on the ABC sitcom from 1975 to 1982, and she had another recurring role, as the grandmother and confidante of Brooke Shields’ character, on the NBC magazine comedy from 1996 to 2000. Suddenly, Susan.
For One potato, two potatoes (1964), directed by Larry Peerce, Barrie was named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of a white woman with a young daughter who, after being abandoned by her loser husband (Richard Mulligan), falls in love and marries an African-American office worker (Bernie Hamilton).
THE Times wrote that Barrie “justifies the (Cannes) prize with an insightful, naturalistic portrait. She is shy, restless and, well, feminine in the extreme as a woman fighting impossible odds to defend her love and her family.”
Released three years ago Guess who’s coming to dinnerthe poignant drama, shot in black and white in Painesville, Ohio, is considered the first American film to depict such an interracial relationship.
Also set in the Midwest – in Bloomington, Indiana – the inspiring coming-of-age tale Break away (1979) saw Barrie receive a supporting actress Oscar nomination for playing the reassuring mother of one (Dennis Christopher) obsessed with Italian bicycle races.
After director Peter Yates told her she had the role, she read a revised script and noticed that “it was about a boy who is at odds with his father but is just a little piece of his mother. Yet you never see a scene between him and his mother,” she recalled in a 2017 interview.
Barrie asked for some sort of “connection scene” to be added, and it turned out to be one in which she shows her son her passport and tells him to follow his dreams. “That scene wouldn’t have been in the photo if I hadn’t asked for it,” she said. “I can’t believe how bold I was to ask.”
Barrie lost to Meryl Streep of Kramer vs. Kramer at the Oscars. She returned as Evelyn Stoller in a 1980-81 ABC adaptation of Break away which starred Shaun Cassidy, but it only lasted eight episodes. However, she also earned an Emmy nomination for this performance.
Barbara Ann Berman was born in Chicago on May 23, 1931. She and her family moved to Texas when she was 9, and she graduated from Corpus Christi Senior High School and then the University of Texas at Austin, where her classmates included Rip Torn, Jayne Mansfield, and Liz Smith.
She came to New York by train to accompany her actor boyfriend and worked as a typist to pay the rent. In 1955, she played the role of a saleswoman in an episode of the ABC series. Théâtre des Étangsmade his Broadway debut in The wooden dish and landed an extra role in Giant (1956), where she can be seen at Mercedes McCambridge’s funeral reception.
A recommendation from none other than Katharine Hepburn led her to John Houseman’s American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Connecticut, and she worked for two seasons alongside Fritz Weaver, Will Geer, Nancy Marchand and Sada Thompson. She also studied with Uta Hagen.
In the early 1960s, Barrie played the role of Annie Sullivan (the role originated by Anne Bancroft) during a State Department tour of The miracle worker who played all over Europe.
To prepare for her role as a catatonic patient at the mercy of an evil nurse played by Joan Crawford in The guardians (1963), Barrie checked herself into a mental hospital in California, then frantically needed the film’s director, Hall Bartlett, to break her out.
She starred in a production of Taming the shrew in Flint, Michigan, when she was spotted by a producer and offered the role of Julie in A potato. “It was a strange and worrying day when that phone call came to Flint,” she said in a 1964 interview with the British newspaper. Times. “It was the same day with police dogs and fire hoses in Alabama. I’m not a crusader, but it was a scary coincidence.”
His role in Business was the only non-singing one among the main cast, but she was featured in the 1970 DA Pennebaker documentary about the making of the show’s legendary cast album.
Known for her boyish blonde hair, she played Goldie Hawn’s mother in Soldier Benjamin (1980) and Edie Falco’s mother in Judy Berlin (1999), earning an Independent Spirit Awards nomination for the latter.
She was also Diana Rigg’s neighbor in a short-lived sitcom in 1973-74; tried to woo Gavin MacLeod in a memorable 1974 episode The Mary Tyler Moore Show; played Mamie Eisenhower in the 1979 miniseries Behind the scenes at the White House; and earned two more Emmy nominations for guest appearances in Law and order And Law & Order: SVU in 1992 and 2003.
His television resume also included ignitions Naked city, The Untouchables, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The fugitive, The Twilight Zone (in the 1963 episode “Miniature” with Robert Duvall) and Enlightened.
She wrote the novels Lone Star – about an Orthodox Jewish family assimilating in Texas – and Adam Zigzag as well as two books on fighting rectal cancer and a colostomy. In an effort to help others, she announced in 2014 that she had been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
In 2008, Barrie donated photographs, programs, an album and other items from his career to the Billy Rose Theater division of the New York Public Library.
She was married to Jay Harnick from 1964 until his death in 2007. They met at an audition and were friends for 12 years before he proposed.
He was the founder and longtime artistic director of TheatreworksUSA, the nation’s largest touring children’s theater company – instrumental in the careers of F. Murray Abraham and Henry Winkler – and the brother of Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.
Besides her daughter, survivors include her son, Aaron, a Broadway producer, and her three grandchildren.
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