"julie harris in forty carats"

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.”