“I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life. If Julie hadn't brought such warmth and love into the part of Frankie, all the directors and writers in the world couldn't have made me love her the way I do in the play.”      -- Ethel Waters

Carson McCullers, adapting her novel of the same name, wrote that it’s "one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there is not much excuse for it otherwise.” The play concerns a 12-year-old alienated tomboy whose closest friends are the family’s African American maid and her six-year-old cousin. When the play opened, it was hailed as “all art of a fresh and sensitive quality.” Despite Julie’s outstanding reviews, she still felt insecure. Ethel Waters would say to her, “Sugar, you just need faith.”

On the road to Broadway, The Member of the Wedding played at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, the oldest operating theater in the United States. A Philadelphia critic wrote, “Last night at the Walnut Julie Harris more than fulfilled all that her ardent admirers had expected. Her Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding is the most exciting performance of several seasons. Actually a young woman of 24, she becomes a child of 12 down to the smallest detail.” On Broadway, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Getting under the surface of the character, the performance illuminates her from within. Add to the intelligent planning of Miss Harris’ performance a touch of personal genius for acting, and there you have the measure of her contribution to the 1950 theater.” During the post-Broadway tour, Boston’s distinguished critic Elliot Norton wrote: “More spectacular and equally remarkable is the acting of Julie Harris, a young woman of 24, who plays with perfect fidelity the part of the 12-year-old girl, Frankie Addams. Her hair cropped like a boy’s, dressed haphazardly, her Frankie is an alert, eager, scatter-brained romantic, resenting the drabness of her surroundings, reaching out for love and beauty, at once fierce and tender, a confused child on the dizzy precipice of adolescence.”

Years after appearing in The Member of the Wedding, Julie recalled, “I think of how it felt standing on the stage at the curtain call, holding the hands of Brandon deWilde and Ethel Waters and hearing a sort of roar, which I’d never heard before. A roar as if the three of us were standing on the edge of the ocean and the waves were roaring, and I thought, ‘What is that noise?”

Although Christopher Isherwood created the character of Sally Bowles, it was playwright John Van Druten who put her on the stage for the first time in his play I Am a Camera. And it was Van Druten who selected Julie Harris to play her. Having seen Julie three times playing the 12-year-old Frankie in Member of the Wedding, he invited her to audition for the role of Sally.

“The reading happened in my apartment in New York. It was astonishing. Julie turned a timid girl into Sally Bowles before my eyes. I sat and stared at her. She seemed neither to move nor change, and I had no idea how or from where she was invoking all those things. After about five minutes, I even forgot to listen to her. When it was over, we talked about the play and the qualities I wanted from it. Julie finally plucked up the courage to ask: “What about ME?” I had forgotten that there had been any question. I answered: “But of course the part is yours.” After she had left, I told the producers that I did not think I had ever sat in a room with so extraordinary an actress.”

“If there were anyone less obvious to cast in the part of a Bohemian, egocentric trollop, it would be Miss Harris, who captivated the town with her restless, dreamy, innocent adolescent in The Member of the Wedding two years ago,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times. “But with a sure sense of originality, Mr. Van Druten has now cast her as an impetuous and brilliant adventuress. She is magnificent. Now we all know what we have always wanted to believe, that Miss Harris can play just about anything.”

For her performance as Sally Bowles, Julie won her first Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Other Sallys drawn by Hirschfeld: Jill Haworth, Liza Minnelli, and Natasha Richardson.

L to R: Edna Best, Sam Jaffe, Julie Harris and Eli Wallach

“Everyone knows that Miss Harris is a rare actress,” wrote New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson appreciatively of Julie Harris’ performance in Jean Anouilh’s play about backstage life and love (adapted by Hirschfeld friend and theater reviewer, Louis Kronenberger and directed by Harold Clurman). “Her Colombe is a masterpiece in miniature. It is a light and luminous performance on tip-toe, with youth and eagerness and quite the most captivating element in this odd drama.” Atkinson also admired the performances of Eli Wallach, Sam Jaffe, and William Windom.

In Atkinson’s Sunday column that followed his review, he returned to the play and Julie’s performance in it. “Julie Harris, as Colombe, reaffirms a previous impression that she is an actress of incomparable sensibility. Even in the early scenes, when she had a passive role, Miss Harris fills the stage with light and life. When the play turns more nearly in her direction, she gives an effortless performance that captures the capricious spirit of this character and keeps it tremulous, intimate and real. “

Hirschfeld had a guest star in his drawing of the production. Nina had asked her father to include her friend’s name, Liza, in a drawing for Liza’s birthday. Hirschfeld was happy to honor his daughter’s request in this drawing, and have fun with his friend, as Liza was Louis Kronenberger’s daughter. "All hell broke loose when it appeared microscopically the following Sunday in the Times,” remembered Hirschfeld. "Flowers and telegrams arrived, congratulating my wife and me on the new arrival! Walter Winchell wrote in his column, “The Hirschfelds are infanticipating.”

A year after his English Stage Company presented Look Back in Anger at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1956, thus ushering in the “Angry Young Man” era of contemporary drama, George Devine brought his production of William Wycherley’s 1675 play The Country Wife to Broadway. Much of the cast, including Laurence Harvey, Pamela Brown, and Ernest Thesiger were British, but there were two important American additions: Julie Harris as Mrs. Margery Pinchwife, the titular character, played by Joan Plowright in the London production; and, in her third Broadway role, Colleen Dewhurst in the supporting part of Mrs. Squeamish.

The critics welcomed the bawdy Restoration comedy. “The company is an astonishing one. Julie Harris, one of our best young tragediennes, turns up in the title role as a hilarious little minx with a British hillbilly accent that rivals Stanley Holloway’s.”

Although the reviewers extolled the production and the performances, they lamented the choice of the Adelphi Theatre for the intimate Restoration comedy. John Chapman wrote in the Daily News that he wished “it could have been put in a more intimate theater than the Adelphi, for a bedroom joke should be more confidential.” Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times joined the chorus of critical complaint, writing that “Pity that so accomplished a production should be consigned to so huge a house. The dimensions of the theater blunt the style.” The year before The Country Wife graced the Adelphi, all 39 classic episodes of The Honeymooners were filmed on its stage. Primarily a musical house, it was renamed the George Abbott Theatre in 1965, before being demolished in 1970.

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(l to r) Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes, Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding, Lynn Fontanne in The Visit, Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, Katharine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing, Judith Anderson in John Brown’s Body,  Ruth Gordon in The Matchmaker, Shirley Booth in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

In 1958, the Playbill Restaurant at the Hotel Manhattan at 45th Street and Eighth Avenue opened, which featured three Hirschfeld murals. In the dining room, decorated with faux theater boxes, each topped with its own glittering chandelier was Hirschfeld’s twenty-four foot stage set mural of the First Ladies of Broadway, featuring “an all-star cast it is not likely to find duplicated on any stage in town.”

Al Hirschfeld’s drawing depicts ten Broadway legends in iconic roles. Included are Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding and Julie’s great friend Shirley Booth in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Years later, when Julie, a long-time resident of West Chatham, Cape Cod, was asked how she spent her time, she responded, “There’s always so much to do.  Reading, corresponding, visiting friends, walking to the beach, studying something. Today for instance, I’ll go to the post office, visit some friends who just had a baby, and drive over to North Chatham to see my friend Shirley Booth. And then there are new scripts to read and wherever I am, I go to the theater.”

Polly Bergen, Peter Ustinov, Julie Harris, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Laurence Olivier, and host Dick Powell

In Al Hirschfeld’s drawing, the men and women who won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Single Performance in a Leading Role await the announcement of the winners for 1960/61. Julie Harris had been honored for her 1958 performance in Hallmark Hall of Fame’s Little Moon of Alban, one of the most fondly remembered dramatic performances of early television. Set in 1919, the script concerns an Irish woman who lost her father, brother and fiancée in the Irish War of Independence, who becomes a nun who is assigned to a hospital where she takes care of wounded English soldiers, in one case one who killed her fiancée. They fall in love, but she chooses to renew her vows as nun, rather than marry the English soldier.  Of Julie’s performance as Brigid Mary Mangan, one critic wrote "She has that ability rare among TV actresses -- and almost non-existent among movie queens -- to pitch out an emotion without excessive gesture, she does not merely underplay, she does something much finer -- she works from inside herself, squeezing out scenes through her pores.

Julie was nominated for eleven Emmy Awards, winning three times. In addition to her award for Little Moon of Alban, she won for her performance as Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina (1962) and for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance as Susan B. Anthony in Ken Burns’ 1999 documentary Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Julie worked with Christopher Plummer, her Little Moon of Alban co-star, several times and would be reunited with him for a 1997 conversation documented by The New York Times, which featured Al Hirschfeld’s final drawing of the actress.

Playwright Joe Masteroff, best known for writing the books for She Loves Me and Cabaret, made his Broadway playwrighting debut with The Warm Peninsula. Despite a successful pre-Broadway tour, it was almost universally panned. One critic wrote that, although the play employed the “magical talents of Julie Harris and June Havoc,” it seemed “an inept and pedestrian effort, conceived in platitudes and bearing slight warmth or conviction.” But it brought Julie Harris and June Havoc together in 1959, the same year that Early Havoc, June Havoc’s autobiography, was published. Julie loved the book and implored June to write a play based on her experiences with the cruelties of the marathon dances of the Depression Era.

June agreed to write the play. “I have written Marathon ’33 as a sort of comic valentine for Julie Harris who assured me that if I could write a book, surely I could write a play. I hope I haven’t failed her. What I’ve done is write a play for Julie with dramatized, fictionalized truth. I hope it’s good enough for her.” Marathon ’33,directed by June Havoc and starring Julie Harris as June, was presented by the Actors Studio Theatre, with the entire production under the supervision of Lee Strasberg. 

June recalled her marathon days: “We danced 45 minutes out of every hour. For three hours out of every 24 your partner would carry you.” Of the grueling rehearsal period for Marathon ‘33, June said “Julie has the strength of a star. It’s safer to start her out with a dummy in the scenes where she has to carry the boy unconscious. The dummy we’re using is tall but light, we’ll increase the weight gradually to 160 pounds. It’s dangerous. Rehearsals have to be covered by an extra amount of insurance.”

Although Marathon ’33 ran for less than two months, it received critical acclaim. It was called “a fascinating and forgotten detail of a crazy period in U.S. history.” Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Coe wrote, “Julie Harris made of Baby June a brilliantly mercurial performance, one of her very finest. Miss Harris and the production reached depths of truth and understanding rarely touched in our theater.” Coe also wrote that the play was “more of a social document than a drama.”

In his review in New York’s Morning Telegraph, Whitney Bolton wrote, “Julie Harris gives the finest, most polished, most glowing performance of her career.” When the play’s closing was announced, Bolton wrote, “I never claimed that as a play it is one of the great plays, because it isn’t. But it is great theater, explosive theater, heartbreaking theater.”

(l to r): Staats Cotsworth, Nan Martin, Howard Da Silva, Julie Harris, Alfred Ryder

“Joseph Papp mentioned to me one day that he was planning to put on Hamlet. So I asked him who would play Ophelia, and when he said he hadn’t decided, I said I’d like to.” – Julie Harris

Julie recalled: “It took a while to become adjusted to rehearsing out-of-doors in the Delacorte Theater. I freckle easily.” Julie also had to adjust to some of the other challenges of working in Central Park, but she ultimately found it a rewarding experience: “You come to feel that you’re sort of a part of a modern miracle. It’s wonderful the way the festival serves the people of New York and how it has become so meaningful in their lives.”

Lewis Funke’s review in The New York Times was colored by the fact that Alfred Ryder, who played Hamlet, was suffering from laryngitis yet was determined to play on press night, which Mr. Funke felt handicapped the rest of the company. Funke reserved his praise for Julie Harris: “Julie Harris, one of the theater’s foremost actresses, has undertaken to play Ophelia, and she is one of the pleasures in an ineffective evening. How beautifully she spoke the lines she had, with what poignancy and anguish. It is a cliche of the theater that very few actresses can sparkle in what is one of Shakespeare’s more difficult roles. But Miss Harris is more than credible as she moves from the gentle maid to whom Hamlet had paid court and then discarded in his own agony, to the young woman overwhelmed and gone mad.”

Asked about her devotion to the theater, Julie said, “You want to slip into this consciousness so that you make the person that you’re trying to become alive, and that’s sort of an act of faith. My soul prays for it to be correct, to be truthful, so it is a sort of prayer inside me that I will be true to that.”

Truth is a quality often mentioned by critics, in conjunction with Julie’s performances. Even in a comedic trifle like Ready When You Are, C.B., Julie’s truthfulness shines through. Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times, “Julie Harris is an enchantress who can make plainness, crotchetiness and stubborn honesty utterly winning. Thanks in large measure to her glowing gift, the play is more than a mild little romantic story.”

In this play by Susan Slade directed by Joshua Logan, an aspiring actress from the Bronx, awaiting the verdict on her own audition for a Tennessee Williams play, rents an apartment on Riverside Drive in order to rent rooms to theater people. She finds the apartment, not through the real estate listings in the newspaper, but by reading obituaries. A well-known film actor who has skipped the set of a multi-million-dollar film offers her $300 a week to hide in her apartment. Eventually he returns to the set in order to give Julie’s character a chance at a part in the film.  In his review for the World-Telegram and Sun, Norman Nadel wrote,“If you don’t set your sights too high, you’ll enjoy your evening. And no matter how high you set your sights, you will be enchanted by Julie Harris as a young New York actress with an inferiority complex and a flair for frugality.”

Producer Cy Feuer invited Julie Harris to audition for the role of Georgina in Skyscraper, a Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn musical based on Elmer Rice’s play Dream Girl. Julie recalled that “I sang for him and said, you see it’s not much of a voice.” “But you have perfect pitch,” he replied. “I took daily voice lessons for the ten months we played. It was a strain. By Saturday nights, I was pretty hoarse. I’d recover for a day and start over. But I loved it. It was a great adventure and a wonderful company.”

Reviewing Skyscraper in The New York Times, Howard Taubman wrote, “Julie Harris moves her character as well as herself into a musical with commanding confidence. You would not mistake her voice for Merman’s; it is small and dry but can carry a tune satisfactorily.” For her performance, Julie was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. (The winner that year was Angela Lansbury in Mame.)

Charles Nelson Reilly recalled that producer/director Cy Feuer called to tell him that leading man Victor Spinetti dropped out of Skyscraper in Detroit and they were desperate for a replacement. Cy asked Reilly to go to Detroit and be ready to play before a sold-out audience of 3,200 at the Fisher Theatre. Reilly thought “Tomorrow night, and I haven’t seen a script. I’m gonna play in a big musical opposite Julie Harris, who was becoming the first lady of the American theater.” He had to learn script, songs, and dances immediately. 

“I went to Detroit in the winter,” remembered Charles, “with a musical that was in trouble and I met Julie Harris who became my life.” Charles and Julie became close, personally and professionally. He later directed her in The Belle of Amherst and other productions.

Julie Harris won her third Best Actress Tony Award for Forty Carats, a play adapted from the French by Jay Presson Allen. Directed by Abe Burrows, the show’s Production Stage Manager was James Burrows, later an acclaimed television director. And co-creator of the sitcom, Cheers. The French farce-like comedy focuses on a pair of generation-gap romances. New Yorker critic Brendan Gill wrote that “Julie Harris is fantastically attractive” and that the play is “a silly trifle so nearly perfect of its kind – so merrily untrue to life and so stoutly true to trifledom – that I doubt if the bleakest curmudgeon in the land would dare to whisper a word against it.” Forty Carats ran for two years. When Julie left the production late in its run, her role was assumed by a succession of celebrities: June Allyson, Joan Fontaine, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. It was later adapted into a film in 1973 with Liv Ullman taking the lead.

Julie Harris and Abe Burrows developed great mutual respect and affection. Abe later wrote to Julie: “I get a small pang when I think that you’re going out there and I won’t be a part of it. I’m sure the people who are part of it know how lucky they are.”

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The Belle of Amherst was a one-woman show based on the life of poet Emily Dickinson, drawing on her poems, diaries, and letters. Long before William Luce’s play graced the stage, Julie Harris’s affection for its titular character was evident. In 1960 she recorded “The Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson” for Caedmon Records. In 1976, Julie Harris recalled that the idea for the play began ten years earlier, when Charles Nelson Reilly saw her in a program that she put together of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. “Charlie saw me do that one evening at the Booth Theater in New York City for a church benefit and he came back stage and was so wild about it and said that should be a play.” Reilly went on to direct The Belle of Amherst.

Appearing in a one-person Broadway show was new to Julie Harris when she undertook the play, in which she played numerous characters. In an interview with Robert Wahls of the New York Daily News, she commented, “At first I felt lonely because some of an actor’s pleasure is sharing a scene, playing to another actor. But I wonder if you noticed? I’ve made the audience take the place of a cast. I play to them.” When the play was filmed for television, the reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor wrote, “Miss Harris seems to be speaking to the heart of every viewer.”

Julie attributed the success of The Belle of Amherst to Walter Kerr’s review in The New York Times. He wrote, “As I look back, I find The Belle of Amherst the most stimulating event of the season, and not only because I've long since been persuaded that Emily Dickinson is our finest poet. It may seem a form of magic to make her most casual lines live so intensely on a stage. But for magic read craft. And for craft—painfully, stubbornly, at last stunningly acquired—read Julie Harris.”

In addition to winning her fifth Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for The Belle of Amherst, Julie won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording. She toured with the play for close to twenty-five years.

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Ken Burns on Julie Harris:
I met her in the 1970s when I was a crew member on a documentary that Jean Mudge’s production company was making. Julie was both narrating and hosting the film, which was called Emily Dickinson: A Certain Slant of Light. Buddy Squires who was to become my long-time cinematographer was filming it, and my other partner Roger Sherman was the sound man. We got to know Julie, who was incredibly generous with her time. She took us kids who were fresh out of college seriously and asked me what I wanted to be doing. I said I was working on a history of the Brooklyn Bridge as a sort of modern-day symbol, and she said, “Let me know how I can help.” When the production was over and we were saying our goodbyes, she said “And don’t forget about the Brooklyn Bridge.” So I called her up a year or so later and said “Would you read off-camera the voice of Emily Roebling, the wife of Washington Roebling, who was the builder and chief engineer?” She said “Yes.” From my Brooklyn Bridge film onward, Julie read for nearly every film, whether it was The Shakers, The Statue of Liberty, The Congress, The Civil War, Baseball, and finally, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, in which Julie voiced Susan B. Anthony.

I cannot say enough about Julie’s generosity, her talent, the way she filled every voice. What we’re doing all the time is asking the people who read to inhabit the words. They’re not projecting from a stage – and Julie is one of the great stage actors of all time – and yet there’s an interiorness to this, because we’re showing old photographs , or newsreels, or paintings, or live cinematography, and so she has to in some ways be interior, closer to cinema, but not even that. And so it was just a pleasure, she taught us a lot, and I’ll tell you that I shamelessly traded on her name, so that whenever I went hunting for a good voice, in the first decade, before The Civil War series came out, and then I could kind of fend for myself – people would say, “Are you kidding me, for free, or whatever it was, SAG minimum?” And they would say “No,” and I would say, “Well Julie Harris has read for nearly every film, “and they would say, “Well that’s another story, and I would end up getting so and so, or so and so. And their agents would completely bend over and say, “Oh, well if you have Julie Harris, that’s something.” It was a wonderful calling card. I told her, I said “I’m a little bit ashamed about it,” and she said “No, no, no, use me.” And so we did, and it was lovely, and she kept in touch, and even after her stroke, which impaired her speech, she would call, and struggle, but would say, “What are you working on, I wish I could be helping.”

I can’t say enough about her. She was a really really wonderful person. We miss her all the time. We always say, “Oh this would be perfect for Julie.” We still say it.

Lucifer’s Child focuses on the later life of the celebrated writer Isak Dinesen, decades after she left Africa. We meet her at home in Denmark as a septuagenarian as she prepares for a trip to New York. Suffering from syphilis acquired from her long-ago womanizing husband Baron Bror von Blixen, she reminisces about her past in Africa..

“So a few years ago, before the 1985 film Out of Africa, I said to [playwright] Bill Luce: ‘We should do Isak Dinesen’,” remembered Harris about the creation of this one woman show. “I’d been reading her since I was 16 in Grosse Point Park – Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales. Then when they published the letters and I read them, that’s when I decided I want to do this strange, wonderful, mysterious, glorious person. But because of the movie, we couldn’t use the material for several years until now. This play is really a different time in her life altogether.” 

“Here is a performer who has been on stage for most of any present-day audience’s lifetime,” wrote theater critic Frank Rich in The New York Times, “and it is pure pleasure for a theater enthusiast to watch the focused energy, twinkling humor and sheer expertise with which she executes her own rarified art.” For her performance in Lucifer’s Child, Julie was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

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“I saw the great Laurette Taylor in the original production of The Glass Menagerie. It was like the lodestar of my life – and always has been,” remembered Julie Harris. “There’s never been anyone who could touch her in that part! It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I felt like I had been struck by lightning. It was earth-shattering. It was just awesome. If this is what the theater can do, I want to do it.” 

In 1964, the pioneering and distinguished LP label Caedmon Records inaugurated a series of audio plays with a production of The Glass Menagerie. The cast included Jessica Tandy, Montgomery Clift, David Wayne, and Julie Harris as Laura. Thirty years later, Julie graduated to the role of Amanda, Laura’s mother. In discussing Amanda, Julie said “My heart went out to her. She isn’t some eccentric lady. I believe that love is at the center of everything she does.” 

“Harris brings to the part an affecting delicacy and a shrewd dramatic intelligence,” wrote John Lahr in his review in The New Yorker. “She doesn’t force herself on an audience. She lets the play speak quietly through the character. As filtered through Harris’s gentle and compassionate heart, Amanda is a decent woman whose confused vitality exhibits both resourcefulness and a kind of heroism in the face of terrible circumstances. Harris finds a sweetness in Amanda’s possessiveness.”

“I loved Julie and loved working with her,” remembered Željko Ivanek who played Tom in the 1994 production. “This is the very first thing that came to mind about our time on The Glass Menagerie:

“The Glass Menagerie has a long second act scene between Laura and the Gentleman Caller. While I usually retired to my dressing room for the duration, I discovered one night that Julie (I feel instinctively I should call her Miss Harris, but she would have frowned on that) spent the whole scene sitting in a chair just off stage, listening to the dialogue. Every night. It was as if once she entered the play, she was not going to leave it for a moment, even if she wasn’t in the scene.

“I also had the pleasure a few times of attending the theater with her. Every time, whether it was Broadway or some small theater out of town, she sat down in her seat like a little girl thrilled to be attending her first show. It was really touching.”

Other Amandas drawn by Hirschfeld: Katharine Hepburn, Maureen Stapleton and Jessica Tandy.

The revival of D.L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which premiered 20 years earlier with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, reunited Julie Harris and Charles Durning, who had performed together in The au Pair Man in 1973 on Broadway. It was Julie’s final performance on Broadway.

Peter Marks wrote in The New York Times: “Julie Harris is incapable of insincerity on stage. She is the perfect instrument of Mr. Durning’s exquisite torture at gin. She’s that cute lady next door, the one with the maternal gaze and the tray of cookies and the cleaver up her sleeve.” For her performance as Fonsia D’Orsey in The Gin Game, Julie received her tenth nomination for a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Of Julie’s longtime friend and director, Charles Nelson Reilly, Marks wrote that he “has the savvy of an efficient trainer: he lets his thoroughbreds run, but never allows their exercise to become undisciplined.” 

Top l to r: Fiona Shaw in The Wasteland, Rebecca Luker in The Boys from Syracuse, David Morse in How I Learned to Drive, Michael Hayden and Angie Phillips in All My Sons, Bebe Neuwirth in Chicago, Donal McCann in The Steward of Christendom

Middle l to r: Michael Gambon and Lia Williams in Skylight, David Rasche in Edmond, Brian Bedford in London Assurance, Janet McTeer in A Doll’s House.

Bottom l to r: Lillias White in The Life, Frank Langella in Present Laughter, Julie Harris in The Gin Game, Christopher Plummer in Barrymore, Anthony Sher in Stanley.

Julie Harris is front and center in Al Hirschfeld’s drawing accompanying “In a Season of Wild Cards, Actors Rule,” a New York Times article by Ben Brantley lamenting the failures of the season just concluded but finding that there’s still a lot to celebrate. “Look beyond the immediate pile of bodies,” he wrote, “and you'll see that the past year has provided more reasons than any in a long time to believe in, and go to, the theater in New York.” Among those Brantley singles out for praise are, “Julie Harris, in one of the most finely shaded performances of an extraordinary career, and Charles Durning as the squabbling geriatrics in Charles Nelson Reilly's fine revival of D. L. Coburn's Gin Game.”

Brantley went on to say that: “Productions that assembled what would seem to be sure-fire ingredients turned into fallen souffles.” He used terms such as “oddly misconceived productions” and “labored and tepid.” But on the positive side, he wrote: “As this season reminds us, creative fire comes from unlikely sources. Leave the cloning to the movies. It's the improbable, the unexpected, the unknown that keep the theater an exhilarating guessing game, one it would be foolish to give up on.”

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Al Hirschfeld’s final drawing of Julie Harris appeared in conjunction with Ben Brantley’s article, “When These Two Chat, an Era Is Speaking.” During the run of The Gin Game, and the run of Barrymore, which starred Christopher Plummer, The New York Times brought both actors together in a hotel suite overlooking Central Park to reminisce about their work together and about theater in general.

Brantley wrote, “In an era of mumbling naturalism, they continue to ply their craft with the heroic presence and ringing enunciation that they believe the theater demands. Ms. Harris has said that there should always be ‘glory’ in the theater; Mr. Plummer, that he has spent much of his life ‘trying to pretend the ordinary doesn't exist.’ And after a half century apiece of performing in it, they both still think of the theater as a home, a religion and the place where they are most comfortable.”

This work was their last Hirschfeld drawings. Julie Harris had been drawn 27 times over 48 years all but two in the theater; Plummer was drawn nineteen times over 42 years, all but one in theatrical productions.