Barbara Barrie died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan at age 95. Jane Harnick, her daughter, said her mother had terminal cancer and that her death was medically assisted.
Breaking Away and Company
Barrie’s career crossed film, Broadway and television, with an Oscar nomination for playing the supportive mother in Breaking Away and one of Company’s then record-setting 14 Tony nominations for playing Sarah in the original 1970-72 production. She also appeared in the first Broadway runs of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue and California Suite, then later in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy and Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other in 2017.
That range made her useful to producers looking for authority without stiffness. The same instinct that carried her through Company and later stage work also helped make her one of the more durable character actors of her generation.
One Potato, Two Potato
In 1964, Barrie was named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for One Potato, Two Potato, a black-and-white film shot on location in Painesville, Ohio and directed by Larry Peerce. The Times praised her performance as “justifies 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.”
One Potato, Two Potato centered on an interracial relationship that was controversial for its era, while Barrie’s breakthrough reputation came from family-centered and supportive-mother roles. She played the wife of the captain of a Greenwich Village police station on Barney Miller from 1975 to 1982, and later had a recurring role as the grandmother and confidant of Brooke Shields’ character on Suddenly Susan from 1996 to 2000.
Breaking Away to Barney Miller
Breaking Away arrived in 1979, with Barrie as the reassuring mother of a kid obsessed with Italian bicycle racing, and she later returned as Evelyn Stoller in the 1980-81 ABC adaptation. She said of one scene, “That scene would not have been in the picture if I hadn’t asked for it,” and added, “I can’t believe the chutzpah I had in asking for it.”
Her death closes a career that moved from film to Broadway to television without losing the controlled, plainspoken quality that directors kept casting. The open question now is simple: the public record does not spell out what specific form of cancer she had or when she was diagnosed.
