And The Name Is Hal Holbrook!

You don't know this guy? Seriously? You might have seen him as Dirty Harry Callahan's boss in "Magnum Force"...
...Or howsabout being everyone's idea of a perfect Deep Throat (until the real guy clued us in a couple of years ago) in "All the President's Men" ...
...I know my parents* would remember him as Mark Twain in his one-man show "Mark Twain Tonight"...
... but since Hal Holbrook just got an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor work in "Into The Wild", I find it hard to believe you don't know who he is.

Well, just in case you don't, here's a little bio from the good people at Hollywood.com, who I'm sure would never make anything up.

A versatile leading man and supporting player whose folksy, avuncular nature often disguised his true acting firepower, Hal Holbrook was best known to audiences for his portrayal of American humorist Mark Twain in his Tony Award-winning one man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” which he performed some 2,000 times between 1959 and 2005. Stage gave him his best showcases, but he was frequently praised for his television work, most notably in “Pueblo” (1973), “That Certain Summer” (1973), and the title role in “Lincoln” (1976). Film success was sporadic, though he was well cast in “All The President’s Men” (1976) and “The Firm” (1993), and he received an Oscar nomination in 2008 for his moving performance in Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” (2008).

Though adept at gentlemanly Southern roles, Holbrook was born Harold Rowe Holbrook, Jr. in Cleveland, OH on Feb. 17, 1925, and raised mostly in South Weymouth, MA. The son of a vaudeville dancer, he was educated at the Culver Military Academy before moving on to Denison University to study theater. He left the school during World War II to serve for three years as an Army engineer; after the war, he returned to Denison, where an honors project on Mark Twain helped to foster an interest in the famed author’s life and works. In 1945, he married actress Ruby Holbrook (with whom he had two children, including actor David Holbrook), and the couple developed a two-person stage show that revolved around interviews with famous figures from history, including Twain. They presented the show during a punishing tour that saw them traveling 30,000 miles to perform 307 shows in 30 weeks.

Holbrook revised the show into a one-man production that focused solely on Twain, and appeared (under considerable makeup) in “Mark Twain Tonight!” for the first time at a school in Pennsylvania in 1954. A job on the daytime soap opera “The Brighter Day” (CBS, 1954-1962) kept him and his new family fed while he performed in and developed the Twain show in clubs and theaters across the country. One of the most notable aspects of “Twain” was that Holbrook had done such extensive research into the author that he never set his program for any given night, and chose what material he would address in each respective show as he performed it.

The hard work paid off when Ed Sullivan caught a performance and invited him to present his Twain on “Toast of the Town” (CBS, 1948-1971) in 1956. The exposure gave Holbrook the boost he needed, and he mounted an Off-Broadway production in 1959. The show ran for 22 weeks, which was followed by another national tour – including a performance for then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower – and a jaunt through Europe which made him the first American actor to go behind the Iron Curtain since World War II. He would pen a book about the show in 1959 – Mark Twain Tonight! An Actor’s Portrait – and go on to perform it for audiences great and small for the next 50 years.

Holbrook made his Broadway debut in “Do You Know the Milky Way?” in 1961, and soon added more stage credits to his c.v., including a 1965 stint as The Gentlemen Caller in “The Glass Menagerie” with Maureen Stapleton and Piper Laurie. The following year proved to be a watershed for the actor; not only did he make his film debut in Sidney Lumet’s “The Group” (1966), but he brought “Mark Twain Tonight!” to Broadway. The production earned him a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, and was later preserved in a 1967 TV presentation which netted him huge ratings and an Emmy nomination. Holbrook had also divorced wife Ruth the previous year, and married actress Carol Eve Rossen, with whom he had his third child, a daughter named Eve. The couple would later split in 1979.

Holbrook’s blend of gravity and compassion made him a natural for film roles requiring some degree of flexible authority, and he found himself cast as understanding fathers, as well as politicians, legal types, military men and law enforcement officials. He could be corrupted, like in his turn as a soft-hearted senator who allows a megalomaniacal rocker to take over the U.S. government in the counterculture nightmare “Wild in the Streets” (1968) or a high school principal with a libidinous secret in the TV-movie “The People Next Door” (1968). And he could be cold, as shown by his straight-arrow police lieutenant who secretly fronts a death squad in “Magnum Force” (1973), the first sequel to “Dirty Harry” (1971). Mostly, he was dependably honest and real – he was a senator pursuing clean air regulation in the Emmy-nominated “A Clear and Present Danger” (1970), which served as the pilot for his short-lived series titled “The Senator” (NBC, 1970-1971); a father revealing his homosexuality to his son in “That Certain Summer” (1972); the captain of a U.S. spy ship captured by the North Koreans in “Pueblo” (1973); Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln” in a series of 1976 TV specials; and one of the most ideal stage managers to date in a 1977 television version of “Our Town.” For this body of work alone, Holbrook won three Emmys – for “The Senator,” “Pueblo,” and “Lincoln” – and received countless nominations. During this time, Holbrook mounted a return to the New York stage with “Mark Twain Tonight!” in 1977.

Holbrook’s film career remained largely an afterthought for most the 1970s and 1980s, though he was widely praised for his largely unseen turn as Deep Throat, the Washington insider who revealed the truth behind the Watergate scandal in “All The President’s Men” (1976). His screen output slowly shifted from big-budget features, including “Julia” (1977) and “Capricorn One” (1978), to smaller dramas and thrillers – in 1983’s “The Star Chamber,” he played a judge who handed down death sentences to criminals who evaded the law – and horror movies, including John Carpenter’s “The Fog” (1980) and the George Romero-Stephen King collaboration, “Creepshow” (1982).

Television remained a source for quality material – he was a mentalist targeted for murder by his wife (Katharine Ross) in the acclaimed “Murder By Natural Causes” (1979); the father of a teenage runaway in “Off the Minnesota Strip” (1980), with a script by David Chase; and a father searching for answers in a police cover-up surrounding his son’s murder in “The Killing of Randy Webster” (1981). He made a terrific screen president on several occasions, from the low-budget feature “The Kidnapping of the President” (1980) to John Adams in the miniseries “George Washington” (1984) and Abraham Lincoln (again) in “North and South” and “North and South Book II” (1985 and 1986). Holbrook’s co-star in “Randy Webster,” the ebullient Southern actress Dixie Carter of “Designing Women” (CBS, 1986-1993), became his third wife in 1984, and he had a recurring role on the series as her boyfriend from 1986 to 1989.

In 1985, Holbrook toured the world with “Mark Twain Tonight!” in honor of the author’s 150th birthday. The jaunt took him from London to New Delhi and points everywhere in between. Meanwhile, the movies gradually began to rediscover Holbrook, beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with substantive roles in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” (1987) and “The Firm” (1993), and later in the acclaimed “Eye of God” (1997), “The Bachelor” (1999), “Men of Honor” (2000) and “The Majestic” (2001). Television also continued to yield regular work, most notably as a series regular on “Evening Shade” (CBS, 1990-1994) as Burt Reynolds’ irascible father-in-law. There were also notable guest turns on “The West Wing” (NBC, 1999-2006) as the Assistant Secretary of State and “The Sopranos” (2006), as a terminal patient who shares a hospital wing and wisdom with a recently injured Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).

In 2004, Holbrook marked his 2,000th performance in and 50th year of consecutive performances of “Mark Twain Tonight!”, and in 2007, his contributions to American theater and the preservation of Twain’s legacy received a special commendation from the State of Mississippi’s legislature. That same year, he was cast as Ron Franz, a lonely elderly man who develops a deep emotional connection with a wayward young man (Emile Hirsch) in Sean Penn’s film version of “Into the Wild.” Critics singled out Holbrook’s affecting turn in a top-notch cast that included William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Vince Vaughn, and Catherine Keener, and he was showered with award nominations, most notably an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor in 2008. The 82-year-old Holbrook was the oldest performer to ever receive such recognition.

The thing I love about Holbrook, and they mention this above, is his absolute sincerity when he acts. Make no mistake, besides the portrayal of Twain (and having a dependable, generic Southern accent in his characters every once and awhile), he is not a chameleon disappearing into each part. He is almost always recognizable.

But I can think of no other actor who can successfully embody both a completely good character or a completely evil one. Holbrook is truth personified in every part he plays.

If there is any justice, he will win an Oscar for that alone.


*That's right smarty, my parents... because I'm not that old, okay??

And The Name Is Suzanne Pleshette!

Fake TV Husband #1.

Real Husband #3.

I wrote previously, when Tom Poston passed away about meeting them (Suzztom? Tomzanne?) at a fiend's wedding and let me just reiterate here, they were very, very nice. I was (and am) a huge fan of both Suzanne Pleshette and Tom Poston and the fact that they were decent enough to listen to me prattle on about my little comedy short I was trying to finish... well, they were at a wedding and didn't have to listen to me at all.

Class.

To lose, in the space of 9 months, one of Steve Allen's original men on the street and Bob Newhart's husky-voiced wife, two people who, in real life, had just found each other again after years of being married to others... well, it's just sad.

And, not to toot my own horn, but it's one of the reasons I blog about character actors so much. These people are part of the foundation of the great stories we remember in film, theatre and television.

To paraphrase Arthur Miller poorly, "attention should be paid".

Here's the New York Times' nice obit of a nice lady.

Suzanne Pleshette, Actress, Dies at 70

By ANITA GATES

Published: January 21, 2008

Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced actress who redefined the television sitcom wife in the 1970s by playing the smart, sardonic Emily Hartley on “The Bob Newhart Show,” died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.

Ms. Pleshette died of respiratory failure, her lawyer, Robert Finkelstein, told The Associated Press. Ms. Pleshette had undergone chemotherapy in 2006 for lung cancer.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Pleshette already had a full career on stage and screen in 1971 when producers saw her on the “Tonight” show with Johnny Carson and noticed a chemistry between her and another guest, Bob Newhart. She was soon cast as the wife of Mr. Newhart’s character, a mild-mannered Chicago psychologist, and the series ran for six seasons, from 1972 to 1978, as part of CBS’s ratings-winning Saturday-night lineup.

Emily Hartley’s teaching job did not receive much attention, but the character was confident, sexy and anything but submissive. Mr. Newhart has said that one of his favorite episodes is the one in which his character learns that Ms. Pleshette’s has a considerably higher I.Q. than his.

Moviegoers knew Ms. Pleshette from a string of Hollywood features, and her low-key performances often transcended thankless roles in bad movies. She made her film debut in a 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy, “The Geisha Boy,” and came to the attention of teenage audiences in her second movie, “Rome Adventure” (1962), a good-girl, bad-girl romance opposite Troy Donahue, the beautiful blond heartthrob of the moment. (Ms. Pleshette played the virgin.) After making another film together in 1964, she and Mr. Donahue married, but lasted only eight months.

Alfred Hitchcock fans knew Ms. Pleshette best as the pretty small-town teacher who not only loses the guy (Rod Taylor) to the blonde (Tippi Hedren), but is also pecked to death by an angry flock in “The Birds” (1963). Because she was a Method actress, “Hitch didn’t know what to do with me,” Ms. Pleshette said in a 1999 Film Quarterly interview with other Hitchcock heroines. “He regretted the day that he hired me.” Many disagreed with that conclusion.

Suzanne Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, to Eugene Pleshette, who managed the Paramount and Brooklyn Paramount theaters, and Gloria Kaplan Pleshette, a former dancer.

An only child, Ms. Pleshette attended the New York High School of Performing Arts, then Syracuse University and transferred to Finch College, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Her professional career began in 1957 with her television debut, a single episode in a short-lived adventure series, “Harbourmaster,” and her Broadway debut in “Compulsion,” a drama about the Leopold and Loeb murder case. In 1959 she appeared in “Golden Fleecing,” a comedy set in Venice, opposite Tom Poston, whom she would marry more than four decades later.

Her real Broadway triumph came in February 1961 when she replaced Anne Bancroft (who had just won a Tony Award) as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke. Her reviews were admiring.

Ms. Pleshette returned to Broadway once more, some two decades later. “Special Occasions” (1982), a play about a divorced couple, was so ravaged by theater critics that it closed after a series of previews and one regular performance. Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, excoriated the play, but praised Ms. Pleshette’s performance: “The throaty voice, wide-open smiles and quick intelligence are as alluring as ever,” he wrote.

Ms. Pleshette had an active film career in the 1960s and the first half of the ’70s. She starred in several Disney movies, including “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976). Early on she dealt with heavier subjects, playing a flight attendant who survives an airline crash in “Fate Is the Hunter” (1964), a sexually compulsive heiress in “A Rage to Live” (1965) and a book editor trying to save a successful young author from himself in “Youngblood Hawke” (1964). Eventually, though, she seemed to settle into comedies, like “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), about a busload of unhappy American tourists.

But it was in television that she received the greatest recognition. She was nominated for an Emmy Award four times, first in 1962 for a guest performance in “Dr. Kildare,” twice for “The Bob Newhart Show” (1977 and 1978) and in 1991 for playing the title role in the television movie “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean.”

She was never in a hit series like “The Bob Newhart Show” again (although there were efforts), but she continued to appear in television movies and as a guest in popular series into the 21st century. Her last role was the estranged mother of Megan Mullally’s character in several episodes of NBC’s “Will & Grace” between 2002 and 2004.

After her divorce from Mr. Donahue, Ms. Pleshette married twice. In 1968 she wed Tom Gallagher, a businessman, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2000. In 2001 she wed Mr. Poston, her long-ago Broadway co-star, who had also been a guest star on “The Bob Newhart Show” and a regular in Mr. Newhart’s second sitcom, “Newhart,” in the 1980s. He died last year.

Arguably Ms. Pleshette’s most memorable television moment was not in “The Bob Newhart Show,” but in the final episode of “Newhart” in 1990. Mr. Newhart’s character, Dick Loudon, was hit in the head by a golf ball and woke up to find himself in Dr. Robert Hartley’s bed, with his beautiful wife, Emily, at his side. The whole second sitcom had been a nightmare.
The episode was considered one of the most successful series finales ever, partly because it managed to remain a secret until it was broadcast. As time passed, some found the scene a useful metaphor for hopes that a difficult situation might turn out to be just a bad dream. In 1999 a headline in the humor publication The Onion read, “Universe Ends as God Wakes Up Next to Suzanne Pleshette.”

And The Name Is Mariette Hartley!

Mariette Hartley is not just someone who has worked a lot (although she has), she is someone who has gone through a lot of real life drama as well...
...and I'm not even talking about working with Sam "Bloody Sam" Peckinpah in "Ride The High Country"...
...and I doubt working with the mighty James Garner in both Polaroid commercials and "The Rockford Files" would've been too stressful...
...or working with the great Bill Bixby in "The Incredible Hulk"(an Emmy award-winning performance) or the short lived sitcom "Goodnight Beantown". Although this still makes it look like Bixby's about to push her off a cliff.



But I digress.

I can remember the first time I saw her in a TV movie made for "The Wonderful World Of Disney" entitled "The Mystery in Dracula's Castle", but she had been working way before then.

And don't take my word for it. Her website's bio will corroborate (yay, I said "corroborate")...

Mariette Hartley is an Emmy Award-winning (and six times nominated) Best Actress. She has established herself as an enduring star on stage, in five television series, countless television movies, and more than a dozen feature films. Her adventurous stage career has embodied the works of Chekhov and Shakespeare as well as musicals, and she has shared the stage with such notables as Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and Charlton Heston. Her tireless efforts in helping humanity through myriad charitable involvements has not only distinguished her career from its early beginnings, but has made her one of the top motivational speakers in the country.

One of the last young performers chosen by MGM Studios to be groomed for motion picture stardom, Hartley conquered Hollywood in Sam Peckinpah's classic Ride the High Country. Her subsequent starring roles included Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller Marnie, with Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren; Skyjacked, with Charlton Heston; and Improper Channels, opposite Alan Arkin, for which she was nominated for a Genie Award (Canada's equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Performance by a Foreign Actress.

Hartley has also appeared in dozens of television projects. She was a regular cast member on the series Peyton Place and Goodnight, Beantown, and guest-starred on episodes of Gunsmoke, The Bob Newhart Show, The Streets of San Francisco, McCloud, M*A*SH, Nash Bridges, and many more. She also starred in such acclaimed TV movies as M.A.D.D.: Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Silence of the Heart. Hartley may be best known for those great Polaroid commercials she did for six years with James Garner, and for which she won three Clio awards, advertising's highest honor. In 1980, she substituted for Jane Pauley on NBC's Today Show, and in 1987 was co-host of CBS's The Morning Program.

More recently, Mariette starred in Hallmark Channel's Meet the Santas, and she currently has a recurring role on Law & Order: SVU.

Hartley studied with Eva Le Gallienne and John Houseman, touring with Houseman's Stratford, CT Shakespeare Festival in A Midsummer Night's Dream and in The Winter's Tale with Bert Lahr. In the early 60s, after moving to Los Angeles, she was a member of the UCLA Theatre Group, starring in To Clothe the Naked, Measure for Measure, and Antigone. She reprised her role as Isabella in Measure for the famed Joe Papp at the Delacorte, who brought her back to play Constance in King John. Regionally, she appeared in The Merchant of Venice (Goodman), Mrs. Warren's Profession (Huntington Theatre); A.R. Gurney's Buffalo Gals (Williamstown); and The Seagull, directed by Jack O'Brien (Old Globe). Locally, she appeared in The Miser with Hume Cronym and Jessica Tandy (Mark Taper) and Chemin de Fer. She received a Drama-Logue Award for Trojan Women and an Ovation nomination for Enchanted April, and toured in The Sisters Rosensweig (Drama-Logue Award), Death Trap, and Copenhagen (for which she received the Broadway Ovation Award). Most recently, her Broadway credits include A.R. Gurney's Ancestral Voices at Lincoln Center, Sylvia at MTC, and Cabaret at Studio 54.

Born in Weston, Connecticut, she is the granddaughter of John B. Watson, the internationally renowned psychologist who founded the school of behaviorism and who taught that children were to be trained, not touched or nurtured. Her warm and affectionate personality is a stunning contrast to her upbringing. In 1990 her autobiography "Breaking the Silence" was a bestseller in hard cover and paperback; it publicly chronicled her personal memories as a child in a home torn apart by alcoholism and depression.

Hartley feels privileged that her celebrity has allowed her to make contributions to society. She is the national spokesperson for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which honored her with an Humanitarian Award for her outstanding work in the field of suicide prevention and research. For her involvement with organizations combating mental illness, Hartley was honored by the Southern California Counseling Center, and received the PSYCHE Award from the L.A. County Psychological Association. She was the first recipient of the California Family Studies Center's "Life Achievement Award" for her strength and ability to overcome family difficulties, and she was honored with the Larry Stewart Leadership and Inspiration Award from the Entertainment Industries Council.

Hartley is also involved with the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, SOJOURN, and M.A.D.D. She hosted an educational video entitled How to Stop the One You Love From Drinking and Using Drugs, which is part of the Paramount Home Video's "Strong Families, Safe Families" series. She was also named Outstanding Mother of the Year by the National Mother's Day Committee in Washington, D.C.



I love watching her in anything, to the point of I will probably try to catch her on Courtney Cox's "Dirt" as she plays Cox's mother on the show.

One of the things I love about her is that she can imbue any character she plays with a real sincerity, even when she plays morally suspect characters.

In the Columbo episode "Try and Catch Me", she plays the murderer's (Ruth Gordon) assistant. For most of the story, until about 3/4 in, you're not quite sure if Hartley is aware of what Gordon did. Finally, they have a scene where they lay the cards on the table and Hartley not only holds her on with Ruth "the only thing you remember about 'Rosemary's Baby'" Gordon, she plays completely against being the blackmailer that her character is.

Hartley just smiles very sweetly and tells her employer that she might like to join her on her upcoming cruise, and that she might also want to talk about her future as Gordon's assistant. And while she gets even more explicit about what she knows, she never loses the smile on her face or the warmth in her eyes. It is amazing watching her in this.

Mariette Hartley is someone that David E. Kelly should call immediately for "Boston Legal" as she is one of these stage trained actors that can frickin' deliver.

...And The Name Is John Slattery!

This guy has been around since the late eighties, but right now you can see him in "Charlie Wilson's War"...
... and he blew me away with his performance in AMC's new show "Mad Men"...
...but did anybody see him in his television debut on "The Dirty Dozen- The Series"? Beuller? Anybody?

Well, it only lasted six episodes, but from what I remember, it felt like rip off of a rip off of a rip off of the original. And counting the two "sequel" tv movies that were made before it, I'm only one "rip- off" off.

But what about Slattery? Good question. Let's see what AMC has to say...



A veteran actor on TV, film and stage, John Slattery made his theater debut in the 1989 play, Lisbon Traviata, which also starred Nathan Lane. Since then, he has appeared on Broadway in Betrayal, Laughter on the 23rd Floor and Rabbit Hole, for which the Drama League nominated him. Off-Broadway, he graced the stage of the Manhattan Theatre Club with performances in Night and Her Stars, Mi Vida Loca and The Extra Man. He also received an LA Drama Critics Award for his role in Three Days of Rain.


Most recently, Slattery’s had a recurring role as a new love interest of Gabrielle on the hit series "Desperate Housewives" and appeared in Clint Eastwood’s critically acclaimed World War II film Flags of Our Fathers.


Slattery has also starred in Mona Lisa Smile, Bad Company, Eraser, Sleepers, City Hall and HBO’s groundbreaking series K Street, which was produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh. He has performed memorable guest appearances on such hit shows as Sex and the City, Will & Grace, Law & Order and Party of Five and was a series regular on Jack and Bobby.


He soon can be seen in several upcoming features including Charlie Wilson’s War, which was directed by Mike Nichols, Reservation Road and Underdog.


Well, I know we all loved "Reservation Road" and "Underdog". But check him out in "Charlie Wilson's War" and watch his first scene with the mighty Phillip Seymour Hoffman. You'll see two pros raising each other's game, line-by-line in a textbook scene of how to listen. Which is what great ensemble acting is all about.

My wife would like to remind us that he's also in a few of the "Sex & The City" episodes from season 3, playing the politician who's into water sports.

Thanks honey.

Slattery has a great way about his acting, a street quality that give even his more waspy characters an edge.

Like his portrayal of the mayor who marries Gabrielle on "Desperate Housewives" this year and last. During the past few months, as his character has become more of a threat to Carlos and Gabrielle, Slattery has added more layers of a swaggering, subtle menace becoming a much-needed balance.

Which you need to when sharing a scene with Ricardo Chavira, who looks like he can snap a guy in two.

John Slattery is one those actors who enters a scene and you can't help but watch everything he does, because the choices he makes are so interesting.

And The Name Is Barbara Harris!

She first came on the scene as one of the "normal" people in the film (here with 2 former SAG presidents William Daniels and Barry Gordon... perhaps she should add "kingmaker" to the special skills section of her resume?)"A Thousand Clowns"...
...but I think her real forte is kookiness herself, as in her strange performance in one of my favorite Altman films "Nashville"...
...however most people my age (again, stop with the jokes, you) will probably remember her as the mother in the original "Freaky Friday".

Like I said, she is mostly known for playing "kooks". But what about the incredibly kooky, redoubtable Wikipedia? Well, here's what some guy who may be lying, has to say about Harris...

Early life
Barbara Harris was born(July 25, 1935) in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of Oscar Harris, an arborist who later became a businessman, and Natalie Densmoor, an accomplished pianist. She began her stage career as a teenager at the Playwrights Theatre in Chicago. Her fellow players included Edward Asner, Elaine May and Mike Nichols.

She was also a member of the Compass Players, the first ongoing improvisational theatre troupe in the United States, directed by Paul Sills, to whom she married at the time. Though the Compass Players closed in disarray, a second theatre opened by Paul Sills called The Second City opened in Chicago in 1959 and attracted national attention. Despite the fact that Sills and Harris had divorced by this time, Sills cast her in this company and brought her to New York to play in a Broadway edition at the Royale Theater, opening on September 26, 1961. For her performance in this, she received her first Tony Award nomination.

Broadway career
Harris received a nomination for the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her Broadway debut in the original musical revue production From the Second City (1961), which ran at the Royale Theater from September 26 to December 9, 1961. The revue also featured the young Alan Arkin and Paul Sand. Produced by the legendary Max Liebman (among others) and directed by Paul Sills, the production presented Harris in such sketches as Caesar's Wife, First Affair, Museum Piece, and The Bergman Film winning critical and audience acclaim.

In a rare 2002 interview in a Phoenix, Arizona newspaper, she recalled her ambivalence about even bringing the troupe to New York from Chicago. She said, "When I was at Second City, there was a vote about whether we should take our show to Broadway or not. Andrew Duncan and I voted no. I stayed in New York, but only because Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner came and said, "We want to write a musical for you!" Well, I wasn't big on musical theater. I had seen part of South Pacific in Chicago and I walked out. But it was Richard Rodgers calling!"

While Rodgers and Lerner were busy working on their original musical for her, she won the Theatre World Award for her role in playwright Arthur Kopit's dark comedic farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad. Next, she received a nomination for the 1966 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), a Broadway musical created for her in the end by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, but not by Richard Rodgers, who left the project. She starred as "Daisy Gamble", a New Yorker who seeks out the help of a psychiatrist to stop smoking. Under hypnosis, the apparently kooky, brash, and quirky character reveals unexpected hidden depths. During her hypnotic trances, she becomes fascinating to the psychiatrist as she reveals herself as a woman who has lived many past lives, one of them ending tragically. While critics were divided over the merits of the show, they praised Harris' performance. The show opened on October 14, 1965 at the Mark Hellinger Theater and ran for 280 performances, earning a total of three Tony nominations. Harris performed numbers from the show with John Cullum on The Bell Telephone Hour - The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner, broadcast on February 27, 1966.

She had previously appeared on Broadway with Anne Bancroft in a 1963 production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, staged by Jerome Robbins, at the Martin Beck Theater; the production received five Tony Award nominations.

Harris gave another memorable performance in The Apple Tree, another Broadway musical created for her, this time by the team of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick, known best for Fiddler On the Roof. The show, in which Harris co-starred with Alan Alda and Larry Blyden was directed by Mike Nichols, opened at the Shubert Theater on October 5, 1966 and closed on November 25, 1967. The show was based on three tales by Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton, and Jules Feiffer and Harris starred in all three, again receiving exceptional reviews, even if the show did not. Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Post wrote "[t]here are many high triumphs of the imagination in the vastly original musical comedy", he added "but it is Miss Harris who provides it with the extra touch of magic." Walter Kerr famously called her "the square root of noisy sex" and "sweetness carried well into infinity". Harris captured the 1967 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. Of her friend and colleague Mike Nichols, she said in 2002, "Mike Nichols was a toughie. He could be very kind, but if you weren't first-rate, watch out. He'd let you know."

Just as Harris appeared poised to join the first ranks of Broadway stars, she stopped appearing on stage after The Apple Tree, except for the off-Broadway first American production of Brecht and Weill's Mahagonny in 1970, in which she played the role of Jenny, originally created by Lotte Lenya. That her Broadway career was so legendary but so brief has long been considered by theater fans to be a major and baffling loss. Always a mercurial, private person, in a 2002 interview, Harris shed some light on why she stopped performing regularly on stage despite all the acclaim. She said, "Who wants to be up on the stage all the time? It isn't easy. You have to be awfully invested in the fame aspect, and I really never was. What I cared about was the discipline of acting, whether I did well or not."

Hollywood career
From 1962 through 1964, she appeared as a guest star on such popular television series as Naked City, Channing, The Defenders and The Nurses. In 1965, she made an auspicious feature film debut as social worker Sandra Markowitz in the screen version of A Thousand Clowns. She co-starred opposite Jason Robards, who played the freewheeling, eternally optimistic guardian of his teenage nephew, the custody of whom is threatened by authorities' dim view of his bohemian lifestyle. The New York Times critic wrote on December 9, 1965 that the movie "has the new and sensational Barbara Harris playing the appropriately light-headed girl". Harris and Robards won Golden Globe nominations and the film won four Oscar nominations, with Martin Balsam winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Robards' brother.

In Neil Simon's Plaza Suite with Walter Matthau, the British entertainment magazine Time Out called the "delightful" Harris' gifts "wasted". She had only slightly better opportunities in The War Between Men and Women with Jack Lemmon, and the screen version of Arthur Kopit's darkly comic Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad with Rosalind Russell as the monstrous mother of Robert Morse who takes the stuffed corpse of her dead husband along on trips. Reviewing the latter film for the New York Times on February 16, 1967, critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "Barbara Harris from the original play cast is as wacky as she was on the stage -- casual and direct and totally blase about the boisterous business of sex. Her tussle to accomplish her purpose, with the corpse falling out into the roam every time she is about to score a field goal, is still the funniest scene."

She earned an Oscar nomination for the 1971 film (which co-starred Dustin Hoffman) Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, about a rich, successful, womanizing pop song writer suffering a debilitating but oddly liberating mental crisis. The script was by Herb Gardner, who also wrote A Thousand Clowns.

Harris Vs. Two Master Directors
In 1975, Harris appeared in one of her signature film roles in Robert Altman's masterpiece Nashville, playing "Albuquerque", a ditzy, scantily clad country singing hopeful who may be far more opportunistic and calculating than she would first appear. Accounts of the film's chaotic and inspired production, particularly in Jan Stuart's book The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece, indicate a clash between actress and director. Still, even among rich and inventive performances by Lily Tomlin, Karen Black, Henry Gibson, Ned Beatty, Ronee Blakely, Shelley Duvall, Keenan Wynn, Keith Carradine, Barbara Baxley, Geraldine Chaplin and others, Harris' wildly eccentric performance and her impassioned singing of "It Don't Worry Me" in the devastating finale stands out. Harris earned a Golden Globe nomination (one of 11 for the film); as Oscar-nominated co-star Lily Tomlin put it, "I was the hugest of Barbara Harris fans; I thought she was so stunning and original." Although the two were set to reunite with Altman in a sequel, that film was never made.

The following year, Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Family Plot as a bogus spiritualist hunting with her cab driver boyfriend for a missing heir and a family fortune. Among a cast that included Bruce Dern, Karen Black and William Devane, Hitchcock was particularly delighted by Harris' quirkiness, skill and intelligence. She received critical kudos for the film, which was based upon the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning and which marked a reunion of Hitchcock with Ernest Lehman, who created the original screenplay for North by Northwest. In a rare interview published in a 2002 edition of the New Times of Scottsdale, Arizona, she admitted, "I turned down Alfred Hitchcock when he first asked me to be in one of his movies." But, finally agreeing to star in Family Plot, she recalled, "Mr. Hitchcock was a wonderful man."

Later Career and Vanishing Act
Harris continued to appear in films of the '70s and '80s including Freaky Friday with a young Jodie Foster, Movie Movie for director Stanley Donen, and The North Avenue Irregulars with Cloris Leachman. She co-starred in The Seduction of Joe Tynan with one of her former Broadway leading men, Alan Alda (who also wrote the screenplay), a tale of a liberal Washington Senator caught in an affair with a younger woman, played by Meryl Streep. In 1981, she starred in Second-Hand Hearts for esteemed director Hal Ashby as "Dinette Dusty", a recently widowed waitress and would-be singer who marries a boozy carwash worker named "Loyal", played by Robert Blake to get back her children from their paternal grandparents. The film, based on a highly sought-after "road movie" screenplay by Charles Eastman, was a disaster that tarnished the careers of all concerned. Critic Vincent Canby in his negative New York Times review on May 8, 1981 opined, "[t]he film's one bright spot is Barbara Harris, who plays Dinette as sincerely as possible under awful conditions. She looks great even when she's supposed to be tacky, and is genuinely funny as she tries to make sense out of Loyal's muddled philosophizing, which, of course, the screenplay requires her to match."

A combination of career frustrations, personal challenges and other issues kept Harris off the movie screen until 1986 when she played a supporting role as the mother of Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married for Francis Ford Coppola. Her last films to date were the 1988 black comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin and Grosse Pointe Blank, in which she played John Cusack's mother.

Many have tried to lure back Harris with other film, stage, and television projects, including Bette Midler who called her "the greatest thing I've ever seen on stage", and tried unsuccessfully to cast her as one of the star strippers in the show-stopping You Gotta Have a Gimmick number in the 1993 TV version of the Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne musical Gypsy.

Harris currently teaches and directs. Asked if she might one day be lured back to mainstream stage, film or television, Harris said in 2002, "Well, if someone handed me something fantastic for 10 million dollars, I'd work again. But I haven't worked in a long time as an actor. I don't miss it. I think the only thing that drew me to acting in the first place was the group of people I was working with: Ed Asner, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May. And all I really wanted to do back then was rehearsal. I was in it for the process, and I really resented having to go out and do a performance for an audience, because the process stopped; it had to freeze and be the same every night. It wasn't as interesting."

In 2005, she briefly resurfaced, guest starring as "The Queen" and "Spunky Brandburn" on the Radio Repertory Company of America audio drama, Anne Manx on Amazonia, which aired on XM Satellite Radio.

Unlike fellow "kook" Goldie Hawn, Harris never gives one the sense of going for the cutes in her performances. She is always coming from a place of reality. Maybe not mine or yours (well maybe mine), but a recognizably real place.

Her performance as John Cusack's senile mother in "Grosse Pointe Blank" is so unexpectedly moving, and I think what I tend to love most about her acting. Barbara Harris is the master of the unexpected choice.