Barbara Barrie, who helped define the supportive mother in film, dies at 95

Barbara Barrie, the actress whose career spanned seven decades of stage and screen, died Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95 years old. Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told The New York Times that Barrie had been battling terminal cancer and chose to die with medical assistance.

For film audiences, Barrie is perhaps best remembered for her performance in the 1979 coming-of-age drama Breaking Away. She played the reassuring mother of Dennis Christopher’s character, a young man obsessed with Italian bicycle racing. Her portrayal earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She lost that year to Meryl Streep for Kramer vs. Kramer.

Barrie has said she actively shaped her role in that film. In a 2017 interview, she recalled reading a revised script and noticing that her character never had a direct scene with her son. She requested a "connecting scene" be added. That request resulted in the film’s closing moment, where she shows her son her passport and encourages him to follow his dreams. "I can’t believe the chutzpah I had in asking for it," she said.

Her stage career was equally distinguished. Barrie originated the role of Sarah, a dieting foodie and wife of a man with a drinking problem, in the original 1970 Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. The musical received 14 Tony nominations at the time, a record that stood for years. She was also a principal cast member in Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue and California Suite, as well as Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy. In 2017, she appeared as a Jewish grandmother in Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other.

Television viewers knew her as the wife of the captain of a Greenwich Village police station on the ABC sitcom Barney Miller, which ran from 1975 to 1982. She also appeared as a recurring grandmother on the NBC series Suddenly Susan from 1996 to 2000. Her television work included guest roles on Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU, which earned her two Emmy nominations, as well as appearances on The Fugitive, The Twilight Zone, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Barrie received critical acclaim for her leading role in the 1964 interracial romance One Potato, Two Potato. She won the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival for portraying a white woman who marries an African-American office worker after being abandoned by her husband. The film, directed by Larry Peerce, is widely considered the first U.S. movie to depict such a relationship. It was released three years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Barbara Ann Berman was born in Chicago on May 23, 1931. She moved to Texas at age nine and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied alongside actors Rip Torn and Jayne Mansfield. She moved to New York to pursue acting and worked as a typist to pay her rent. A recommendation from Katharine Hepburn helped her secure a position at John Houseman’s American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. She also studied with acting coach Uta Hagen.

Barrie was married to Jay Harnick, the founder of TheatreworksUSA, from 1964 until his death in 2007. They met at an audition and were friends for 12 years before he proposed. She is survived by her daughter Jane, her son Aaron, a Broadway producer, and three grandchildren. In 2008, she donated photographs, programs, and a scrapbook from her career to the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library. She also wrote novels and books about overcoming rectal cancer and colostomy, and announced a diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2014.