American actress whose stage prominence began in 1945 and earned her five Tony awards out of a record ten nominations, with periodic ventures into movies and television. Broadway credits are upward of 30, but TV brought her the widest fame with her seven-year stint as LiliMae Clements in “Knots Landing,” which ran from 1981 to 1987. She was also a Grammy Award winner and a three time Emmy Award winner.
The product of a happy childhood, she grew up in Grosse Point, Michigan, the daughter of a well-off investment banker and his wife, a trained nurse. She studied for a year at Yale before making her Broadway bow in 1945 in “It’s a Gift,” which lasted a few weeks. She hit it big in 1950 with the role of Frankie Addams, the motherless 12-year-old tomboy in Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding.” She then came back two seasons later as Sally Bowles in “I Am a Camera,” the non-musical forerunner to “Cabaret.”
Her movie debut reprised the Addams role in “The Member of the Wedding” in 1952, and merited an Oscar nomination. Over the decades, her stage roles have ranged from Joan of Arc in “The Lark,” 1955 to Mary Todd Lincoln in “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln.” In 1977, she played Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst,” which she said was her favorite role.
Harris’ film work, though less frequent, included “East of Eden,” 1955, “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” 1962, “The Haunting,” 1963 and “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” 1967. She did a number of real-life stage portraits that include Charlotte Bronte in “Bronte,” Isak Dinesen in “Lucifer’s Child” and James Joyce’s wife, Nora, in “Is He Still Dead?”
Her planned 1999 projects were “Winter,” “Amber Patches,” “Scent of the Roses” and a new production called “Staying on Alone,” in which she portrayed Alice B. Toklas, yet another real-life character for her gallery.
Harris was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1979, received the National Medal of Arts in 1994, and the 2002 Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.
Harris married and divorced three times, to Jay Julien, 1946-1954, with whom she had a son; Manning Gurian, 1954-1967; and Walter Carroll, 1977-1982. When not on Broadway or on the road, she lived in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
A breast cancer survivor, she suffered a severe fall requiring surgery in 1999, a stroke in 2001, and a second stroke in 2010. Julie Harris died on 24 August 2013 of congestive heart failure at her home in West Chatham, Massachusetts. She was 87.
Link to Wikipedia biography