‘Life Is Dramatic’

Her portrayal, notable for its high emotion, had the effect of humanizing a woman whom history had been unkind to as a chilly, erratic spendthrift.

“Some people asked me, ‘Why do you have to cry so much in ‘The Last of Mrs. Lincoln?’ ” she said in 1979. “My answer was that she was always crying. She couldn’t speak of her children who died, without crying. And after the assassination, her whole life was gone. She clung to the pain. As actors, that’s what we deal with. My mother used to say to me, ‘But you’re so dramatic.’ Yes, I’d say, that’s what I’m supposed to be. Life is dramatic, all the time, much more than on stage.”

Ms. Harris most famously portrayed the poet Emily Dickinson at home as a fiercely observant, proudly literary and deeply self-conscious near-agoraphobe in “The Belle of Amherst,” a one-woman show written by William Luce that appeared on Broadway in 1976 and was filmed for public television.

Throughout her career, on television and in the movies as well as on the stage, she was drawn to historical figures, among them Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Brontë, Isak Dinesen, Queen Victoria, and Nora (wife of James) Joyce. She spoke in interviews of her fondness for research and the usefulness of it.

“I love biographies,” she once said. “I get very excited by the truth that comes out of what people have left behind, like letters. I first fell in love with Emily Dickinson when I read her letters. It’s like listening to someone’s heart.”

“The Belle of Amherst” was widely admired as a tour de force by Ms. Harris. A performance that wrested astonishing clarity and variety of mood from a portrait of a brilliant, introverted recluse, it struck at least one critic, Walter Kerr of The Times, as the pinnacle of Ms. Harris’s career.

“As I look back, I find ‘The Belle of Amherst’ the most stimulating event of the season, and not only because I’ve long since been persuaded that Emily Dickinson is our finest poet,” Mr. Kerr wrote. “It may seem a form of magic to make her most casual lines live so intensely on the stage. But for magic read craft. And for craft — painfully, stubbornly, at last stunningly acquired — read Julie Harris.”

Julie Ann Harris was born on Dec. 2, 1925, in Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., an affluent suburb just east of Detroit. Her father, William, was an investment banker who was also an expert on squirrels and a curator of mammals at the museum of zoology of the University of Michigan. Her mother, who had trained as a nurse, was a socialite whose aspirations for her daughter to become a debutante contributed to young Julie’s career path. In an interview in 1965, Manning Gurian, then Ms. Harris’s husband, her second, said his wife’s youthful interest in performing had been a way of rebelling against her mother.

“Julie was a great disappointment to her,” Mr. Gurian said. “She wasn’t pretty, didn’t wear the right clothes, couldn’t find dates; and she had no intention of becoming a debutante — which was the dream of Mrs. Harris’s life. As a defense, Julie escaped into acting. As an actress she could be anyone she wanted to and her mother couldn’t stop her.”

Ms. Harris was married and divorced three times. She is survived by a son, Peter Gurian.

Determined on Her Path

As a girl, Ms. Harris devoured movies — she claimed she’d seen “Gone With the Wind” 13 times — read biographies of great actresses and performed in school plays. She was sent to a finishing school in Providence, R.I., but she persuaded her parents to enroll her instead in Miss Hewitt’s Classes, a girl’s prep school in Manhattan (now known as the Hewitt School), which offered drama classes. In summers she trained at an acting camp in Steamboat Springs, Colo., where her mentor, Charlotte Perry, encouraged her to apply to the Yale School of Drama.

During the year she spent at Yale, she got her first Broadway role in a short-lived comedy, “It’s a Gift,” playing a professor’s daughter who stands to inherit some money but only under morally compromising circumstances. In the late 1940s Ms. Harris appeared in small roles in a series of shows, including British productions of “King Henry IV, Part 2” and “Oedipus,” both with Laurence Olivier, and “The Playboy of the Western World,” with Burgess Meredith and Maureen Stapleton; in a 1948 production of “Macbeth,” which starred Michael Redgrave, she was a witch.

In 2001, Ms. Harris suffered a stroke, which impeded her speech and curtailed her ability to perform, though she later appeared in a handful of films, including “The Way Back Home” (2006), in which she played a stroke victim. In 2005, she was a Kennedy Center honoree.

Ms. Harris worked almost constantly for decades — she took the job in “Knots Landing” as she was recuperating from a mastectomy after a bout with breast cancer — but she said the dedication had come with a cost: she regretted, she said, that she did not have more children.

Her film credits include “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1962), a boxing melodrama with Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Gleason, in which she played a sympathetic but manipulative social worker; “The Haunting” (1963), as a spinster beset by evil spirits; “Harper,” a detective story starring Paul Newman, in which she played a nightclub entertainer and addict; “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967), an adaptation of a McCullers novel set on an Army base in which she played the sickly wife of an officer who was cheating on her with another officer’s wife (Elizabeth Taylor); “The Bell Jar” (1979), an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel, in which she played the mother of a suicidal young woman; “Gorillas in the Mist” (1984), in which played Roz Carr, a friend to the murdered zoologist Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver), and “HouseSitter” (1992), a romantic comedy with Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin; she played his mother.

On TV she appeared in guest spots on a variety of popular dramas, comedies and romances, including “Family Ties, “The Love Boat, “Columbo,” “The Name of the Game,” “Tarzan” and “Medical Center,” and a remarkable number of westerns (“Rawhide,” “Laredo,” “Daniel Boone,” “The Big Valley,” “Bonanza,” “The Virginian”).

She starred in a couple of series of her own, though both were short-lived. In one, “Thicker Than Water” (1973), she was a spinster whose father asked her to help run his pickle factory; in the other, “The Family Holvak” (1975), she starred with Glenn Ford as the wife of a Depression-era preacher. She did voiceovers in several of the documentaries by Ken Burns, including the voice of a Southern diarist, Mary Boykin Chesnut, in “The Civil War.”

But it was clear that the stage was where she was most at home. Unusual among performers of her stature, she was not averse to taking shows on the road. She toured in, among other plays, “The Belle of Amherst,” “Lettice and Lovage,” “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Gin Game.”

Sometime after she turned 70, Ms. Harris was asked what she would do today if she learned that the world would end tomorrow.

“I’d go to the theater,” she said.

Julie A Harris