Topic: Julie Harris

Julia Ann "Julie" Harris (born December 2, 1925) is an American stage, screen, and television actress. She has won five Tony Awards, three Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award, and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1994, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts. She is a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She also received the 2002 Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.

Harris's screen debut was in 1952, repeating her Broadway success as the monumentally lonely teenage girl Frankie in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. That film also preserves the original Broadway cast performances of Ethel Waters and Brandon DeWilde. That same year, she won her first Best Actress Tony for originating the role of insouciant Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, the stage version of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (later musicalized as Cabaret on Broadway in 1966 and, in the 1972 film, with Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles.) Harris repeated her stage role in the 1955 film version of I Am a Camera. She also appeared in such films as East of Eden (1955), with film icon James Dean (with whom she became close friends), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), with Paul Newman in the private-detective film Harper in 1966, and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967).

Horror film fans remember Harris as the ethereal Eleanor Lance in The Haunting, director Robert Wise's 1963 screen adaptation of a novel by Shirley Jackson, a classic film of the horror genre considered by many to be the scariest movie of all time. Another cast member recalled Harris maintaining a social distance from the other actors while not on set, later explaining that she had done so as a method of emphasizing the alienation from the other characters experienced by her character in the film.