Barbara Barrie, Original Company Star, Dies at 95

Barbara Barrie, Tony-nominated creator of Sarah in Company and an Oscar nominee for Breaking Away, has died at her Manhattan home at age 95.

@sharedot

Barbara Barrie, Original Company Star, Dies at 95

By @sharedot · · 8 pages

  • Theater
  • Broadway
  • Barbara Barrie
  • Company

Barbara Barrie, Tony-nominated creator of Sarah in Company and an Oscar nominee for Breaking Away, has died at her Manhattan home at age 95.

A Six-Decade Career Comes to a Close

Barbara Barrie died October 28 at her home in Manhattan at age 95, according to a report her daughter Jane Harnick gave to The New York Times that multiple outlets relayed. The family said her death was medically assisted following a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Over a career spanning more than six decades, Barrie earned nominations at the Tony Awards, the Academy Awards and the Emmys, moving between Broadway, Hollywood and television with unusual ease.

Sarah in Company: The Signature Stage Role

Theatergoers will remember Barrie above all as the original Sarah in Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Company, the Harold Prince-directed exploration of marriage that opened in 1970 and won the Tony for Best Musical.

She earned a 1971 Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for the role — one of the production's then-record-setting 14 nominations, as The Hollywood Reporter notes — and later called Sarah "the role that was a blast" in broadway.com's Role Call series.

She appeared in 11 Broadway productions by Deadline's count, from her 1955 debut in The Wooden Dish through The Prisoner of Second Avenue, California Suite, Torch Song Trilogy and a 2017 farewell in Significant Other.

The Cannes Win That Made History

Barrie's screen breakthrough came in 1964's One Potato, Two Potato, a black-and-white drama filmed in Painesville, Ohio, in which she played a divorced white woman whose marriage to a Black office worker, played by Bernie Hamilton, becomes the focus of a custody fight.

She won the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress award for the role.

The Hollywood Reporter reports the film is believed to be the first U.S. movie to portray such an interracial relationship, released three years before Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — the kind of groundbreaking distinction devoted theater readers will recognize as a genuine landmark.

From Breaking Away to Barney Miller

In 1979's Breaking Away, Barrie played the supportive mother of Dennis Christopher's aspiring cyclist and earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, losing to Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer.

The Hollywood Reporter recounts how she lobbied director Peter Yates for a "connecting scene" with her son — the passport moment — and later marveled at "the chutzpah I had in asking for it."

She reprised the role in the TV adaptation for an Emmy nomination, and television audiences also knew her as Liz Miller on Barney Miller and as Brooke Shields' grandmother in Suddenly Susan, where Deadline counts 92 episodes across five seasons.

Author and Advocate Beyond the Stage

Barrie also wrote the young adult novels Adam Zigzag and Lone Star, and two memoirs about surviving rectal cancer and a colostomy — Second Act (1997) and Don't Die of Embarrassment (1999) — written to reduce stigma around the illness, per the pack's reports.

She disclosed a 2014 diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Off-Broadway, her performance in The Killdeer at the Public Theater earned Obie and Drama Desk Awards in 1974, and she played Shakespeare heroines including Helena and Viola at the Delacorte Theater.

What Her Passing Means for the Stage Community

In 2008 she donated photographs, programs and a scrapbook from her career to the New York Public Library's Billy Rose Theatre Division, according to The Hollywood Reporter, preserving the record of a career that stretched from 1950s anthologies to a 2017 Broadway finale.

For a niche audience that treasures Sondheim's circle, the tributes now arriving across the theater press will be the next chapter to watch.

Sources

  1. broadway.com › Barbara Barrie, Tony-Nominated Company Star and Oscar Nominee, Dies at 95
  2. deadline.com › Barbara Barrie Dead: Star Of Broadway And 'Barney Miller' Was 95
  3. hollywoodreporter.com › Barbara Barrie, Actress in 'Breaking Away,' 'Company' and 'Barney Miller,' Dies at 95
  4. pagesix.com › Oscar-nominated actress, 95, ends life with medical assistance following terminal cancer diagnosis
  5. variety.com › Barbara Barrie, Oscar-Nominated Star of 'Barney Miller' and 'Breaking Away,' Dies at 95

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