Julie Harris
--Carolyn J. Bennett

I first saw Julie Harris in her Oscar-nominated film, The Member of the Wedding. It was a movie that impacted my life. I was six or seven and my aunt and her boyfriend took me to the movies with them (and without my sister) which made it a most important day in my young life! I was fascinated by the character she played, this Southern tomboy. I recognized that we shared a certain curiosity and sense of adventure, something that's stayed with me always. I suppose I always attributed those same characteristics to Julie Harris.

I spoke with Ms. Harris by telephone from her home on Cape Cod in Massachusetts where she's lived for the past 18 years. She just finished a run in the play, Ladies in Retirement at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida with Eileen Brennan and Laura Esterman. The play was directed by Charles Nelson Reilly with whom Ms. Harris has worked many, many times. "He's wonderful to work with," she said. "He's very inventive and very loving and spirited and funny. It's not like working at all. It's like a picnic.

Ladies in Retirement is a long play to do eight shows a week. It's three hours long, and during the run of the show she celebrated her 70th birthday. After such a gruelling schedule, I asked her what she does to relax. She said she's never really had time for hobbies, but she reads a lot, likes to garden and knit and draws sometimes. She donates her time and talents to The Clearview School in Scarboro, New York, a school for emotionally disturbed children, and she does a lot of AIDS benefits.

She's not a woman of these electronic times -- no answering machine, no car phone, no fax machine. But, she says, "I'm not as bad as Harry Brogan. We did a film together in Ireland called Sally's Irish Rogue adapted from a play by an Irish writer, George Shiels called New Gosoon. Harry lived in the mountains outside Dublin and he didn't even have a telephone. They had to send a runner whenever they needed him."

She's had an illustrious stage career, starting on the New York stage right after high school graduation. She made her broadway debut in 1945. She's won five Tony awards, the most ever won by a performer. The first was in 1952 for I Am a Camera, the second in 1956 for The Lark, her third Tony was in 1969 for Forty Carats, followed in 1973 by The Last of Mrs. Lincoln. In 1979 she won the unprecedented fifth Tony for The Belle of Amherst which she also did for television, both directed by Charles Nelson Reilly.

In film, she was nominated for an Academy Award for The Member of the Wedding. The film role for which she is best known, however, is Abra opposite James Dean in East of Eden. She also played in The Truth About Women; Requiem for a Heavyweight; Harper; The People Next Door; Reflections in a Golden Eye; The Hiding Place; Housesitter and The Dark Half.

She's probably best known to TV audiences for her seven year stint on the hit CBS series, Knots Landing playing Lilimae Clements and an A&E television movie, Lucifer's Child by William Luce about the life of Isak Dinesen. But, she has an extensive television career and has been nominated for nine Emmy Awards and won the coveted award for Little Moon of Alban and Victoria and Regina.

I asked her about working in the different mediums, stage, film and TV. "The theatre is unique in itself in that the actor is able to experience the whole story at one time, from beginning to end, which is really a wonderful thing. But, film work is always back and forth, up and down, bits and pieces. The actor doesn't get the chance to experience the whole story at one time. The audience doesn't realize that when they watch the film that it was put together in pieces. It's not as much fun for the actor."

She toured last year in Lettis and Lovage. "I love going to new theatres," she said, "playing to different audiences in different parts of the country. When you do a play in New York, once you have a long run perhaps you don't have that excitement that you have on the road because every city is an opening night."

I asked her if there were any roles that she hadn't had a chance to do that she really wants to. "I did two performances in Studio City, California of a play called Countess by Donald Freed about Sonia Tolstoy. It was a benefit. I'd like to work on that again," she said.

She has two movies yet to be released. Gentle Into the Night with a French actor, Tcheky Karyo. It's about an older lady who's trying to get home and she's forgotten. And then there's a film with Amy Irving and Dennis Hopper that will be called either Farmer or Acts of Love directed by Bruno Beretto. She's also involved in doing radio dramas for Susan Lowenberg of the L.A. Theatre Works. "Susan produces live plays and then puts them on tape. I did Mrs. Klein with JoBeth Williams and Lindsay Crouse. Uta Hagen's doing it in New York," she said.

Interviewing Julie Harris was wonderful. She's every bit as warm and unpretentious as I'd always felt she would be. As an actress, I have to say that to watch her work is to take a master class. As a woman now in my "late middle years", I embrace her as a role model. Today, Julie Harris is still slim, still pretty, still powerful. A grande dame of the American stage.