That woman had various names which I learned from studying volumes of Theatre World a sort of Broadway yearbook in the stacks of the college library near where I grew up in Winston Salem N.C. She was Helen Hayes Kim Stanley Katharine Cornell among others. But the actress who towered most luminously for me rather like a Statue of Liberty for Broadway was Julie Harris the six time Tony winner who died on Saturday at 87.
This was partly because she was a favorite of my mother whose enchantment with stage acting had been honed in college plays and who evoked Ms. Harris s name as a byword for theatrical magic. My family also had a faint but thrilling personal connection to Ms. Harris. One of my father s best friends was a writer who was said to have been in love with Ms. Harris when they were both at Yale.
So among the great American stage actresses of the 20th century it was Ms. Harris who most held my imagination. I didn t make it to New York even as a tourist until I was 16 so I was forced to be content with her appearances on the screen a television version of A Doll s House that I must have seen before I could read and the movies The Member of the Wedding and East of Eden.
She had a heightened almost feverish presence that seemed tantalizingly at odds with the naturalism of film. Ms. Harris was unabashedly ardent in a way that most movie stars were not. Her tremulousness suggested she experienced life more intensely than those around her.
This made her ideal for the self dramatizing heroines she had originated onstage and then recreated on film the madcap Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera and the anguished 12 year old Frankie of Wedding characters who long to be somehow exceptional who were by nature and by faith theatrical.
I mean it as a compliment when I say that when I watched her in a film I could imagine her onstage in the theater for me as a kid the more exalted art. And when I finally did see Ms. Harris on a Broadway stage in Lucifer s Child a one woman show about Isak Dinesen the glow was only brighter and she seemed larger than she had in cinematic close up.
As it happened though my first experience of Ms. Harris in the flesh was not across the footlights. In my early 20s at the request of my parents I introduced myself to her at a party I was covering as a reporter for Women s Wear Daily. (I was shy but she was shyer.) She had married that writer friend of my dad s his name was Walter Carroll many years and several marriages after they had first known each other.
So that Christmas Julie and Walter came to visit my parents. There she was in the house where I grew up looking and behaving like just another of my parents middle aged friends. I hung back self conscious and a bit disappointed leaving the older folks to their conversation. It may have been around that time that I decided it was best to keep your distance from people you had turned into deities.
It would be another 20 years before I would have my second personal encounter with Ms. Harris. By then I had become a theater critic for The New York Times and she was appearing in a revival of The Gin Game on Broadway. Though Ms. Harris s marriage to Mr. Carroll had ended she and my mother remained friendly. In one letter to my mother Ms. Harris noted how pleased and surprised she was that I had mentioned her in describing the incandescence of another actress.
I was stunned that she would be surprised. How could she not have known how much of a reference point she would be for me and so many other theatergoers a standard to which we inevitably compared others Wearing the armor of my professional identity I arranged to do an interview with her and another stage performer I had adored in my youth Christopher Plummer.
It was 1997 and they had both been on Broadway that year she in a revival of The Gin Game and he as John Barrymore in the one man bio drama Barrymore. We were to assemble in Mr. Plummer s hotel suite. I picked Ms. Harris up in the Murray Hill apartment where she was staying. She wasn t quite ready and she greeted me almost brusquely. You re early was the first thing she said in the throaty voice that she used onstage and I sat transfixed while she finished dressing in an anxious slightly frantic whirlwind grumbling about the inconveniences of where she was living. I remember thinking happily that here at last was the actress I had always wanted to meet.
Later at Mr. Plummer s hotel the two stage veterans spoke and behaved exactly as I not just as a reporter but as a fan had hoped they would. Ms. Harris s voice seemed to grow in timbre as they recalled appearing in The Lark together in 1955. Talking about the drama of the theater (Mr. Plummer had joined The Lark as a last minute replacement when the play was in trouble) she was irresistibly dramatic. And yes she glowed. When I left I realized I had been trembling.
Ms. Harris said many things during that interview most of which are on the record about the theater as her life her religion. But the words of hers that I haven t been able to get out of my head since she died were repeated to me by mother who had been on the phone with Ms. Harris around the same time. You know Lib my mother recalled Ms. Harris saying every morning I wake up and think I m going to start my life all over again. Then I look in the mirror and realize that I can t.
But of course she could for as long as she could appear on a stage. That was her blessing and ours.
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