Barbara Barrie, Actress in ‘Breaking Away,’ ‘Company’ and
‘Barney Miller,’ Dies at 95
An Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominee, she was impressive early
in her career in the groundbreaking drama 'One Potato, Two Potato.'
The Hollywood Reporter
By Mike Barnes
October 28, 2026
Barbara Barrie, the sprightly actress who starred in the
heart-wrenching interracial drama One Potato, Two Potato and earned an Oscar
nomination for playing the supportive mom in Breaking Away, died Wednesday. She
was 95.
Barrie died at her home in Manhattan, The New York Times
reported. Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told the newspaper that she had terminal
cancer and that her death was medically assisted.
Barrie also portrayed the dieting foodie Sarah, the wife
of a man with a drinking problem (Charles Kimbrough), in the original 1970-72
production of Stephen Sondheim‘s Company, and she received one of the landmark
musical’s then record-setting 14 Tony nominations.
A veteran of the stage, 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, more recently, as a Jewish
bubbe in 2017 in Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other.
Fans of Barney Miller know Barrie for playing the wife of
the captain of a Greenwich Village police station (Hal Linden) on the 1975-82
ABC sitcom, and she had another recurring role, as the grandmother and
confidant of Brooke Shields’ character, on the 1996-2000 NBC magazine-set
comedy Suddenly Susan.
For One Potato, Two Potato (1964), directed by Larry
Peerce, Barrie was named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her
portrayal of a white woman with a young daughter who, after being abandoned by
her loser husband (Richard Mulligan), falls in love and marries an
African-American office worker (Bernie Hamilton).
The Times wrote that Barrie “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.”
Released three years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,
the poignant drama, filmed in black and white on location in Painesville, Ohio,
is believed to be the first U.S. movie to portray such an interracial
relationship.
Also set in the Midwest — in Bloomington, Indiana — the
inspiring, coming-of-age tale Breaking Away (1979) saw Barrie receive a
supporting actress Oscar nom for playing the reassuring mother of a kid (Dennis
Christopher) obsessed with Italian bicycle racing.
After director Peter Yates told her she had the part, she
read a revised script and noticed that “it was about a boy who is at odds with
his father but who is a chip off the block of his mother. Yet you never see a
scene between him and his mother,” she recalled in a 2017 interview.
Barrie asked for some kind of “connecting scene” to be
added, and that turned out to be the one in which she shows her passport to her
son and tells him to follow his dreams. “That scene would not have been in the
picture if I hadn’t asked for it,” she said. “I can’t believe the chutzpah I
had in asking for it.”
Barrie lost out to Meryl Streep of Kramer vs. Kramer at
the Oscars. She returned as Evelyn Stoller in a 1980-81 ABC adaptation of
Breaking Away that starred Shaun Cassidy, but that lasted just eight episodes.
She did, however, earn an Emmy nom for that performance as well.
Barbara Ann Berman was born in Chicago on May 23, 1931.
She and her family moved to Texas when she was 9, and she graduated from Corpus
Christi Senior High School and then the University of Texas at Austin, where
her classmates included Rip Torn, Jayne Mansfield and Liz Smith.
She came to New York by train to accompany her boyfriend,
who was an actor, and worked as a typist to pay the rent. In 1955, she starred
as a shop girl on an installment of ABC’s Ponds Theatre, made her Broadway
debut in The Wooden Dish and landed a walk-on part in Giant (1956), where she
can be seen at Mercedes McCambridge’s funeral reception.
A recommendation from none other than Katharine Hepburn
got her into John Houseman’s American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford,
Connecticut, and she worked for two seasons alongside the likes of Fritz
Weaver, Will Geer, Nancy Marchand and Sada Thompson. She also studied with Uta
Hagen.
In the early 1960s, Barrie starred as Annie Sullivan (the
role originated by Anne Bancroft) in a State Department tour of The Miracle
Worker that played throughout Europe.
To prepare for her part as a catatonic patient at the
mercy of a nasty nurse played by Joan Crawford in The Caretakers (1963), Barrie
signed herself into a mental hospital in California, then frantically needed
the director of the film, Hall Bartlett, to get her out.
She was starring in a production of Taming of the Shrew
in Flint, Michigan, when she was spotted by a producer and offered the role of
Julie in One Potato. “It was an odd, eerie day when that phone call came to
Flint,” she said in 1964 interview with the Times. “It was the very same day
with police dogs and fire hoses in Alabama. I’m not a crusader, but it was a
spooky coincidence.”
Her role in Company was the only nonsinging one among the
principal players, but she was featured in the 1970 D.A. Pennebaker documentary
on the making of the show’s fabled cast album.
Known for her blond, boyish bob, she played Goldie Hawn’s
mom in Private Benjamin (1980) and Edie Falco’s mother in Judy Berlin (1999),
getting an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the latter.
She also was Diana Rigg‘s next-door neighbor on a
short-lived sitcom in 1973-74; tried to woo Gavin MacLeod on a memorable 1974
episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show; portrayed Mamie Eisenhower on the 1979
miniseries Backstairs at the White House; and earned two more Emmy noms for
guest-starring stints on Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU in 1992 and
2003.
Her TV résumé also included turns on Naked City, The
Untouchables, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Fugitive, The Twilight Zone (in
the 1963 episode “Miniature” with Robert Duvall) and Enlightened.
She wrote the novels Lone Star — about an Orthodox Jewish
family assimilating in Texas — and Adam Zigzag as well as two books about
overcoming rectal cancer and a colostomy. In an effort to help others, she
announced in 2014 that she had been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary
fibrosis.
In 2008, Barrie donated photographs, programs, a
scrapbook and other items from her career to the Billy Rose Theatre Division of
the New York Public Library.
She was married to Jay Harnick from 1964 until his death
in 2007. They met at an audition and were friends for 12 years before he
proposed.
He was the founder and longtime artistic director of
TheatreworksUSA, the nation’s largest touring children’s theater company —
which was instrumental to the careers of F. Murray Abraham and Henry Winkler —
and the brother of Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.
In addition to her daughter, survivors include her son,
Aaron, a Broadway producer, and three grandchildren.
BARRIE, Barbara (Barbara Ann Berman)
Born: 5/23/1931, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
Died: 10/28/2026, New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Barbara Berri’s westerns – actress:
Giant – 1956 (Mary Lou Decker)
The Virginian (TV) - 1963 (Ellen Beecher)
Rawhide (TV) - 1965 (Liz Harmon)
Scarlett (TV) - 1994
