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Throughout the next two decades, Broadway was her playground and her home, and that astonishing versatility she displayed early on would become one of the hallmarks of her career. Rare is the actress who can triumph in one-woman shows, Restoration comedy, French farce, light comedy, historical drama and even a musical. Her vacations from Broadway found her playing the great classical roles (including Juliet and Ophelia) at Stratford in Canada and the New York Shakespeare festivals. Harris has also made a career of bringing to the stage the lives of historical women, building over the years a rich gallery filled with luminous portraits, exciting in their boldness, often heartbreaking in their vulnerability: Joan of Arc, Mary Todd Lincoln, Isak Dinesen, Florence Nightingale, Nora Joyce (wife of James), Dora Carrington (of Bloomsbury fame), Fanny Osbourne (wife of Robert Louis Stevenson), the actress June Havoc, Queen Victoria (on television), and perhaps most famously, Emily Dickinson in her one-woman hit, "The Belle of Amherst." Some of her best work has also been for television and theatrical films. In the movies, she followed her Oscar for "The Member of the Wedding," by appearing opposite James Dean in "East of Eden," bringing her Sally Bowles to the screen, and working not often, but colorfully in, among others, "Requiem for a Heavyweight," "The Haunting," "Harper," "You're a Big Boy Now," "Reflections in a Golden Eye," "The Hiding Place," "The Bell Jar" and "Gorillas in the Mist." On television she played Ibsen ("A Doll's House"), Shaw ("Pygmalion") and Shakespeare ("Hamlet"), and, for seven wildly convoluted years, in a little California cul-de-sac known as "Knots Landing," where she portrayed the eccentric audience favorite Lillimae Clements from 1981 to 1987. |
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 Television may have brought her the widest fame, but the stage always gave her the most intense joy and once her job on the prime time soap opera was over, she returned to the theater with a vengeance. She toured the country in "Driving Miss Daisy" and "The Gin Game" and starred in a revival of "The Glass Menagerie" on Broadway. Now in her seventies, she continues to commission plays from playwrights and to appear in venues huge and small because, as she says, "What is thrilling about the theater is that it's a forum where people come and for those two or three hours belong to something, to ideas, to a feeling of being a member of the human race." PAGE: 1 | 2 |
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