Barbara Barrie, the actress who earned an Oscar nomination for playing a supportive mother in "Breaking Away" and won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for "One Potato, Two Potato," has died at 95. The New York Times reported that she died Wednesday at her home in Manhattan.
Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told the newspaper that Barrie had terminal cancer and that her death was medically assisted.
Barrie's Cannes honor came for the 1964 drama "One Potato, Two Potato," directed by Larry Peerce. She played a white woman with a young daughter who, abandoned by her husband (Richard Mulligan), falls in love with and marries an African-American office worker (Bernie Hamilton). Filmed in black and white in Painesville, Ohio, the picture arrived three years before "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and is believed to be the first U.S. movie to portray such an interracial relationship. The Times said she "justifies the [Cannes] prize with a portrayal that is perceptively naturalistic."
She was spotted in a Flint, Michigan production of "Taming of the Shrew" and offered the role. In a 1964 interview with the Times, she recalled that the call came on the same day police dogs and fire hoses were being used in Alabama. "I'm not a crusader, but it was a spooky coincidence," she said.
In "Breaking Away" (1979), set in Bloomington, Indiana, Barrie played the reassuring mother of a teenager (Dennis Christopher) obsessed with Italian bicycle racing. After reading a revised script, she noticed the son was much like his mother yet had no scene with her, and she asked for a "connecting scene." The result was the moment in which she shows her passport to her son and urges him to follow his dreams. "That scene would not have been in the picture if I hadn't asked for it," she said in a 2017 interview. She lost the Oscar to Meryl Streep of "Kramer vs. Kramer." She later reprised the role in a short-lived 1980-81 ABC series adaptation, earning an Emmy nomination.
On stage, Barrie played Sarah, the dieting foodie, in the original 1970-72 production of Stephen Sondheim's "Company," and received one of its then record-setting 14 Tony nominations. She also appeared in the first Broadway runs of Neil Simon's "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" and "California Suite," in Harvey Fierstein's "Torch Song Trilogy," and in 2017 in Joshua Harmon's "Significant Other."
Television audiences knew her as the wife of the police captain played by Hal Linden on "Barney Miller" (1975-82) and as the grandmother of Brooke Shields' character on "Suddenly Susan" (1996-2000). She portrayed Mamie Eisenhower in the 1979 miniseries "Backstairs at the White House" and earned two more Emmy nominations for guest roles on "Law & Order" and "Law & Order: SVU." Film credits included "Private Benjamin" (1980) and "Judy Berlin" (1999), the latter bringing an Independent Spirit Award nomination.
Born Barbara Ann Berman in Chicago on May 23, 1931, she moved to Texas at age 9 and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. She came to New York by train, worked as a typist, and made her Broadway debut in "The Wooden Dish" before studying with Uta Hagen and working at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. She also wrote two novels and two books about overcoming rectal cancer and a colostomy, and in 2014 announced her diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Barrie was married from 1964 until 2007 to Jay Harnick, longtime artistic director of TheatreworksUSA, who died that year. Survivors include her daughter, her son Aaron, a Broadway producer, and three grandchildren.
