Barbara Barrie, Star of Breaking Away, Dies at 95

Barbara Barrie, the actress who earned an Oscar nomination for playing a supportive mother in Breaking Away, died Wednesday at her Manhattan home. She was 95.

Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told The New York Times that Barrie had terminal cancer and that her death was medically assisted. Barrie’s career spanned more than five decades of stage and screen work, during which she received recognition for her performances in dramas, comedies, and television series.

Her first major film honor came in 1964. She won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for One Potato, Two Potato, directed by Larry Peerce. In the black and white picture, filmed in Painesville, Ohio, she played a white woman who married an African American office worker. The film is believed to be the first U.S. movie to portray such an interracial relationship. The New York Times noted that her portrayal was perceptively naturalistic.

Barrie received her Academy Award nomination in 1979 for Breaking Away. The film was set in Bloomington, Indiana. She played the mother of a teenager obsessed with Italian bicycle racing. After reading a revised script, she noticed the son had no scene with his mother and asked for a connecting moment. The result was a scene where she shows her passport to her son and urges him to follow his dreams. 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 the stage, Barrie played Sarah in the original 1970-72 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. She received one of the play’s 14 Tony nominations. She also appeared in the first Broadway runs of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue and California Suite, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, and Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other in 2017.

Television audiences knew her as the wife of the police captain played by Hal Linden on Barney Miller from 1975 to 1982. She also appeared on Suddenly Susan from 1996 to 2000 as the grandmother of Brooke Shields’ character. She portrayed Mamie Eisenhower in the 1979 miniseries Backstairs at the White House. She earned two more Emmy nominations for guest roles on Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU.

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. She studied with Uta Hagen and worked at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. She wrote two novels and two books about overcoming rectal cancer and a colostomy. In 2014, she announced a diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Barrie was married from 1964 until 2007 to Jay Harnick, the longtime artistic director of TheatreworksUSA. He died that year. She is survived by her daughter Jane, her son Aaron, a Broadway producer, and three grandchildren.