‘Lettice & Lovage’ Role Provides Fresh Challenge for Julie Harris : Stage: Veteran actress and five-time Tony winner says she has no plans to retire anytime soon. Her San Diego run starts tonight.

The first play Julie Harris remembers seeing as a child was a touring production of “What a Life” in Detroit. It was a prophetic title. Not long after, she decided acting was the life for her.

“I just loved it. I saw a musical called ‘Cabin of the Sky,’ where Ethel Waters was the star. I saw Orson Welles’ production of ‘Native Son.’ I saw the Lunts and Katherine Cornell and Helen Hayes.”

Over half a century later, this five-time Tony winner has become the first lady of touring herself.

She will star as Lettice Douffet, the eccentric tour guide in the San Diego Playgoers presentation of Peter Shaffer’s Broadway hit “Lettice & Lovage.” The show opens at the San Diego Civic Theatre tonight and runs through Sunday.

The tour ends after stops in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles--other cities were cut because of low box office sales--but Harris already has plans for other projects to take across the country.

“Something always seems to turn up,” she said cheerfully from her hotel room in Chicago where she was finishing up a tour of “Lettice.”

“I am an actor who looks for things I can do solo since ‘The Belle of Amherst’ (the play about Emily Dickinson for which she won her fifth Tony). There’s a play about Charlotte Bronte, a play about Isak Dineson, a play about Countess Tolstoy. I’d like to go back to that.”

Despite all the years of experience, playing Lettice has proved a fresh challenge for her. The character is an exuberant, fast-moving, fast-talking British tour guide who gets fired by her superior, Lotte Schoen (Roberta Maxwell), because of her fabrications; later Schoen, feeling guilty, tries to make amends.

Harris compares it to doing Shakespeare.

“Those speeches have to be so much in your blood that there’s no time to think about what you are saying. Lettice is so extraordinarily gifted with words that you, the actor, have to have the same facility, and it just has to flow out of you. Some people you meet, such as Peter Shaffer, have a great deal of this. He is very gifted with the spoken word himself. But I’m very opposite from that. I don’t have that kind of vocabulary at my command. I stammer and get through it, but I’m not gifted that way. Lettice is, and that took hard work.”

Harris, who will be 67 in December, was born Julia Ann Harris in upscale Gross Pointe, Mich. Her parents were at first surprised and not at all encouraging about her interest in theater, but when she persuaded them that the stage was her passion, they agreed to send her to a summer camp specializing in drama and later to a program in New York. She spent one year at the Yale School of Drama, before landing her first part in “It’s A Gift” in 1945.

The role that made her famous came when she was just 24: the part of the lonely 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams in the Carson McCullers play, “The Member of the Wedding.” She re-created her role in the movie version. But one of the special pleasures of the production was the opportunity to play opposite Ethel Waters, whom she had seen and admired as a teen-ager when Waters came to Detroit on tour.

“It was just wonderful--a perfect, beautiful experience,” she said with a sigh. “Really, I have been so lucky.”

The stage work never stopped. She won her Tonys for the Sally Bowles character in the film and Broadway hit “I Am a Camera,” the Christopher Isherwood work on which “Cabaret” is based; Joan of Arc in Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark;” Mary Todd Lincoln in “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln;” Ann Stanley, the middle-aged divorcee in “Forty Carats,” and Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst.”

Her film career was not as satisfying, which she blames on her looks.

“I’m not handsome or beautiful or pretty even,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m the sort of person who can give you an illusion in the theater of whatever has to be given in the theater, but photographically I’m not wonderful looking.”

Which may come as a surprise to those who remember her in the sexy starring role opposite James Dean in “East of Eden.”

But she brushes that off.

“I looked fairly decent, but the makeup has to be very carefully done.”

She managed to get nine Emmy nominations anyway, winning two for “Little Moon of Alban” and “Victoria Regina,” and had a seven-year part as country-Western singer Lillimae Clements in “Knots Landing” (her television son was Alec Baldwin). Most recently, she was in the movie “Housesitter” playing Steve Martin’s mother.

Over the years, she married and divorced--three times. She has one son, Peter Gurian, by her second husband, Manning Gurian. Her son lives in Massachusetts--”a jack-of-all-trades” as she puts it. She lives in Cape Cod, in the community of West Chatham.

Most roles she takes on in the theater are of women she admires intensely. She invests in those parts not just physically, but spiritually. The late Harold Clurman, who directed her in “The Member of the Wedding” compared her once to a nun whose church is the stage.

She loves Lettice.

“I adore her. The part always reminded me of the wife of Charles Laughton--Elsa Lanchester. She was an extraordinary performer.”

Harris is aware that Maggie Smith, who created the role of Lettice in London and in New York, made quite a sensation with critics and audiences. Harris saw Smith and admired her herself when she caught the show in London.

Harris’ performance will be different.

“I couldn’t possibly do it the way she did it. She has a particularly comic vocal approach. A heightened voice that’s very funny. I don’t have that. I think my Lettice is sort of homier, more cozy.”

The show gets its title from an herb, lovage, that Lettice uses to brew a drink. It’s a magic ingredient that makes things palatable. In a larger sense, it’s the ingredient we all look for in life, seeking it out in love, work and friendship.

Acting is Harris’ lovage. Always has been. She does not think about retiring. She’d rather think about theaters she has not worked in yet.

“I love acting unconditionally. I love it all--the whole process. I love learning the role, rehearsing it, performing it.”

It all ties in, too, with her desire to keep touring. To bring Broadway theater to audiences outside New York, in much the way she experienced it long ago in Detroit.

“It was thrilling to see something that you knew had been a big hit in New York, especially if you didn’t have the chance to go to New York,” she said softly.

She is returning that gift now to audiences who remind her of herself so many years ago: “I get letters from people who say, ‘You have no idea what this meant to me.’ ”