Career
Barrie has had a lengthy career on stage and in film and television. In the early 1950s, she appeared in seven television productions before receiving her first starring role, in the "Wait For Me" installment of the Robert Montgomery Presents series. Her professional theater debut came in 1953, in a Corning, New York, production of The Moon Is Blue, with her Broadway debut occurring in the short-lived The Wooden Dish. She received the award for Prix d'interprétation féminine (best actress — tied with Anne Bancroft) at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival for her role in One Potato, Two Potato, a breakthrough film about an interracial marriage and institutionalized American anti-miscegenation. Her other high-profile roles have been as Susan's (Brooke Shields) grandmother on the sitcom Suddenly Susan, and as the wife of the title character (portrayed by Hal Linden) on the comedy-drama Barney Miller. In the mid-2000s, Barrie played a recurring role on the Showtime cable-TV drama series Dead Like Me. She also starred in the 1963 Twilight Zone episode "Miniature", alongside Robert Duvall.
In 1970, Barrie earned a Tony Award nomination for her role in the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's musical Company, in which she played "Sarah", the weight-watching, karate-practicing married friend of the lead character, "Robert". In 1979 she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in the sleeper hit Breaking Away. Also in 1979, she portrayed Mamie Eisenhower in the NBC miniseries Backstairs at the White House.
A near-encounter with Barrie is the subject of Christine Lavin's song "The Moment Slipped Away."
Barbara Barrie also acted as Aunt Margo of the twins (Liz and Jean Sagal) in the TV show Double Trouble in the '80s (1984 to 1985); she also played the part as the blind girl Celia in the episode “Even Stones Have Eyes” on Route 66 (second season, 1962). In 1993 she played Gloria Unger in the television movie The Odd Couple: Together Again, a role originated by Janis Hansen on the original series The Odd Couple.
Barrie is the author of two critically acclaimed novels for young adults: Lone Star (1989) and Adam Zigzag (1995).
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)