\n\tBarbara Barrie, the sprightly actress who starred in the heart-wrenching interracial drama One Potato, Two Potato and earned an Oscar nomination for playing the supportive mom in Breaking Away, died Wednesday. She was 95.<\/p>\n
\n\tBarrie died at her home in Manhattan, The New York Times reported<\/a>. Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told the newspaper that she had terminal cancer and that her death was medically assisted.<\/p>\n \n\tBarrie also portrayed the dieting foodie Sarah, the wife of a man with a drinking problem (Charles Kimbrough<\/a>), in the original 1970-72 production of Stephen Sondheim<\/a>\u2018s Company, and she received one of the landmark musical\u2019s then record-setting 14 Tony nominations.<\/p>\n \n\tA veteran of the stage, she also appeared in the first Broadway runs of Neil Simon<\/a>\u2018s The Prisoner of Second Avenue and California Suite, in Harvey Fierstein\u2019s Torch Song Trilogy and, more recently, as a Jewish bubbe in 2017 in Joshua Harmon\u2019s Significant Other<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tFans of Barney Miller know Barrie for playing the wife of the captain of a Greenwich Village police station (Hal Linden) on the 1975-82 ABC sitcom, and she had another recurring role, as the grandmother and confidant of Brooke Shields\u2019 character, on the 1996-2000 NBC magazine-set comedy Suddenly Susan.<\/p>\n \n\tFor One Potato, Two Potato (1964), directed by Larry Peerce, Barrie was named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of a white woman with a young daughter who, after being abandoned by her loser husband (Richard Mulligan), falls in love and marries an African-American office worker (Bernie Hamilton).<\/p>\n \n\tThe Times wrote that Barrie \u201cjustifies the [Cannes] prize with a portrayal that is perceptively naturalistic. She is timid, worried and, finally, feminine in the extreme as a woman fighting against impossible odds in defense of her love and family.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tReleased three years before Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner, the poignant drama, filmed in black and white on location in Painesville, Ohio, is believed to be the first U.S. movie to portray such an interracial relationship.<\/p>\n \n\tAlso set in the Midwest \u2014 in Bloomington, Indiana \u2014 the inspiring, coming-of-age tale Breaking Away (1979) saw Barrie receive a supporting actress Oscar nom for playing the reassuring mother of a kid (Dennis Christopher) obsessed with Italian bicycle racing.<\/p>\n \n\tAfter director Peter Yates told her she had the part, she read a revised script and noticed that \u201cit was about a boy who is at odds with his father but who is a chip off the block of his mother. Yet you never see a scene between him and his mother,\u201d she recalled in a 2017 interview.<\/p>\n \n\tBarrie asked for some kind of \u201cconnecting scene\u201d to be added, and that turned out to be the one in which she shows her passport to her son and tells him to follow his dreams. \u201cThat scene would not have been in the picture if I hadn\u2019t asked for it,\u201d she said. \u201cI can\u2019t believe the chutzpah I had in asking for it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBarrie lost out to Meryl Streep of Kramer vs. Kramer at the Oscars. She returned as Evelyn Stoller in a 1980-81 ABC adaptation of Breaking Away that starred Shaun Cassidy, but that lasted just eight episodes. She did, however, earn an Emmy nom for that performance as well.<\/p>\n \n\tBarbara Ann Berman was born in Chicago on May 23, 1931. She and her family moved to Texas when she was 9, and she graduated from Corpus Christi Senior High School and then the University of Texas at Austin, where her classmates included Rip Torn<\/a>, Jayne Mansfield<\/a> and Liz Smith<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tShe came to New York by train to accompany her boyfriend, who was an actor, and worked as a typist to pay the rent. In 1955, she starred as a shop girl on an installment of ABC\u2019s Ponds Theatre, made her Broadway debut in The Wooden Dish and landed a walk-on part in Giant (1956), where she can be seen at Mercedes McCambridge\u2019s funeral reception.<\/p>\n \n\tA recommendation from none other than Katharine Hepburn got her into John Houseman\u2019s American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, and she worked for two seasons alongside the likes of Fritz Weaver<\/a>, Will Geer, Nancy Marchand and Sada Thompson. She also studied with Uta Hagen.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the early 1960s, Barrie starred as Annie Sullivan (the role originated by Anne Bancroft) in a State Department tour of The Miracle Worker that played throughout Europe.<\/p>\n \n\tTo prepare for her part as a catatonic patient at the mercy of a nasty nurse played by Joan Crawford in The Caretakers (1963), Barrie signed herself into a mental hospital in California, then frantically needed the director of the film, Hall Bartlett, to get her out.<\/p>\n \n\tShe was starring in a production of Taming of the Shrew in Flint, Michigan, when she was spotted by a producer and offered the role of Julie in One Potato. \u201cIt was an odd, eerie day when that phone call came to Flint,\u201d she said<\/a> in 1964 interview with the Times. \u201cIt was the very same day with police dogs and fire hoses in Alabama. I\u2019m not a crusader, but it was a spooky coincidence.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHer role in Company was the only nonsinging one among the principal players, but she was featured in the 1970 D.A. Pennebaker<\/a> documentary on the making of the show\u2019s fabled cast album.<\/p>\n \n\tKnown for her blond, boyish bob, she played Goldie Hawn\u2019s mom in Private Benjamin (1980) and Edie Falco\u2019s mother in Judy Berlin (1999), getting an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the latter.<\/p>\n \n\tShe also was Diana Rigg<\/a>\u2018s next-door neighbor on a short-lived sitcom in 1973-74; tried to woo Gavin MacLeod<\/a> on a memorable 1974 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show; portrayed Mamie Eisenhower on the 1979 miniseries Backstairs at the White House; and earned two more Emmy noms for guest-starring stints on Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU in 1992 and 2003.<\/p>\n \n\tHer TV r\u00e9sum\u00e9 also included turns on Naked City, The Untouchables, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Fugitive, The Twilight Zone (in the 1963 episode \u201cMiniature\u201d with Robert Duvall<\/a>) and Enlightened.<\/p>\n \n\tShe wrote the novels Lone Star \u2014 about an Orthodox Jewish family assimilating in Texas \u2014 and Adam Zigzag as well as two books about overcoming rectal cancer and a colostomy. In an effort to help others, she announced in 2014 that she had been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.<\/p>\n \n\tIn 2008, Barrie donated photographs, programs, a scrapbook and other items from her career to the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library.<\/p>\n \n\tShe was married to Jay Harnick from 1964 until his death in 2007. They met at an audition and were friends for 12 years before he proposed.<\/p>\n \n\tHe was the founder and longtime artistic director of TheatreworksUSA, the nation\u2019s largest touring children\u2019s theater company \u2014 which was instrumental to the careers of F. Murray Abraham and Henry Winkler \u2014 and the brother of Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tIn addition to her daughter, survivors include her son, Aaron, a Broadway producer, and three grandchildren.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barbara Barrie, the sprightly actress who starred in the heart-wrenching interracial drama One Potato, Two Potato and earned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":898058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,138067,3,10756,452,453],"class_list":["post-898057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-jayne-mansfield","tag-news","tag-obituaries","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}