But the temptation of complete security led to the longest stint of her career. These films and television dramas, notably House on Greenapple Road (1970), a Columbo feature, Any Old Port in a Storm (1973), the lead in a film version of The Last of Mrs Lincoln (1976) and in 1979 The Gift and then Backstairs at the White House, playing Helen Taft, kept her busy. A year later in Voyage of the Damned she was a member of an all-star cast playing German Jewish refugees on a ship seeking sanctuary in 1939 but refused a port of call and eventually sent back to Germany. In The Hiding Place (1975) she played, with great commitment, Betsie ten Boom, one of two Dutch sisters who gave refuge to Jewish people and suffered the consequences in a concentration camp. She faced an even worse fate in two factually based features.
Although not a commercial success, it was more to her taste than Harper (1966), in which she was tortured by Robert Webber, or The People Next Door (1970), where she suffered at the hands of a drug-addicted daughter. On screen she was proud of her Mrs Greenwood in the adaptation of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1979). While appearing in a production of Fossils in 2001 in Chicago, she suffered a stroke. During the 1990s she enjoyed success in a stage version of Driving Miss Daisy, a tour of Lettice and Lovage and a New York revival of The Glass Menagerie. Harris was also well-suited to the role of the wife in On Golden Pond, in which she starred on stage during 1980, although Katharine Hepburn took the role in the film the following year. A filmed version of the show was seen on British television in 1978. I vividly recall her command of the inner strength and beauty both of the character and the poetry. She toured extensively in this production, including a trip to London. Stage roles of note included Joan of Arc in The Lark (1955, for which she won another Tony) a musical, Skyscraper (1966) the comedy Forty Carats (1969, a third Tony) The Last of Mrs Lincoln (1972), which although it was not a success won her a fourth Tony and in 1976 the one-woman show The Belle of Amherst (her fifth Tony), based on the poems and secluded life of Emily Dickinson. Not that she remained idle, making dozens more films, innumerable television appearances and always returning to her first love, the theatre. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Julie Harris with James Dean in East of Eden, 1955. Harris held her own in this illustrious company, but never again encountered such a heady cocktail of the director John Huston, a superb screenplay and three such co-stars. In the hothouse atmosphere of a southern army camp, Alison is a highly strung instrument playing as part of a discordant quartet, comprising also Brian Keith, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, giving his greatest performance as the Major. In Reflections in a Golden Eye she played the vulnerable Alison, tended by a fey Filipino house-boy, while neglected by her adulterous husband. In 1966 she played Miss Thing in Francis Ford Coppola's inspired comedy You're a Big Boy Now and the following year was reunited with the genius of McCullers in the best film of her career. Harris was perfectly cast as the timid Eleanor, prey to the terrors of the haunted mansion. Happily, the 1960s yielded three more enduring screen roles, including Robert Wise's classic horror film The Haunting (1963), shot in Britain. She fared slightly better on television in an adaptation of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1961), playing the priest's mistress, and as Ophelia in Hamlet (1964).
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Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) was an inferior film version of Rod Serling's TV drama and Harris seemed adrift in the part originally played by Kim Hunter.
Her brilliance led the director Elia Kazan to cast her as Abra, opposite James Dean, in East of Eden (1955), but much of the screen work that followed immediately afterwards was feeble, including a British comedy, The Truth About Women (1957) and Sally's Irish Rogue (1958). Although the rest of the film proved a dismal affair, Harris had shown that she could adapt to the more intimate demands of cinema. In 1955 that play too graduated to the screen with Harris as the outlandish heroine.
Harris won a Tony award for best actress (the first of a record five) and was lauded by the critic Brooks Atkinson as an "actress of genius". She received an Oscar nomination as best actress and it mattered little when she lost out to Shirley Booth, since in the interim between play and film, she had triumphed again on Broadway, as the nightclub singer Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera (1951), based on Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin. In 1952 Fred Zinnemann directed the film version of the play, in which, once again, Harris was supported by the incomparable De Wilde and Ethel Waters. Julie Harris portraying Emily Dickinson in the play, The Belle of Amherst, in London in 1977.
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