Sharing the Soul of the Poet

What becomes a legend most? In the case of Julie Harris, one of the leading ladies of the American theater, the answer may well be other legends.

Winner of an unprecedented five Tony Awards, the famously petite actress has assayed a wide range of roles in theater, film and television, in a career that spans six decades and is still going strong. Yet she’s also made a specialty of portraying historical women.

Harris has taken on the roles of Mary Todd Lincoln, Isak Dinesen, St. Joan, Charlotte Bronte, Countess Tolstoy and others. Recently, it was announced that she will receive her third Emmy, for voice-over performance as Susan B. Anthony in the PBS special “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.”

But the one that has become Harris’ signature is Emily Dickinson in William Luce’s “The Belle of Amherst.” The performance, for which she won her fifth Tony in 1977, also triumphed on television and as a Grammy-winning recording. Originally conceived and directed by Harris’ longtime friend and colleague Charles Nelson Reilly, “The Belle of Amherst” opens Saturday at the Laguna Playhouse, again directed by Reilly. The engagement marks the beginning of a national tour of the new production.

From her breakthrough movie role as Frankie Addams in 1952’s “The Member of the Wedding,” to her performance opposite James Dean in “East of Eden,” to her seven-year stint on the CBS series “Knots Landing,” Harris has proven both a virtuoso and a chameleon.

“I like to think an actress can put on any kind of mask,” says the dulcet-voiced Harris, 74, speaking by phone from her home in Cape Cod, Mass., where she’s lived for the last 20 years. “I’ve been very blessed in being able to do many remarkable plays. I love variety in the theater. I don’t want one kind of play. I like being a clown one minute and a queen the next. I have no favorite roles.”

“There’s a lot of the child in her, but there’s also the regal qualities of the women she’s played,” says Reilly, who has known Harris for 35 years and worked with her on 14 productions. “She says, ‘I’m just a showoff,’ playing all these famous women. But she’s a very good one, an artist.”

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It’s especially apt that Dickinson has become a signature role for Harris because the actress’ love for the poet is long-lived.

“Since I was introduced to Emily about 40 years ago, I’ve loved her,” Harris says. “She inspires and nurtures me all the time. She’s the one who said, ‘My business is to love.’ I understand, and I feel for her capacity to love.

“Emily Dickinson is a unique figure in American literature, a great poet and a great woman. Her philosophy always washes over like a balm for the soul. It’s spiritually good for all of us to hear her words.

“I believe that Emily Dickinson has a great deal to say to human beings,” Harris continues. “I’m like an evangelist. I want everyone to hear her words and partake of her soul.”

One of the striking qualities of Harris’ performance is how thoroughly she embodies Dickinson. The veracity is a result not only of Harris’ passion for her subject, but also of assiduous craftsmanship. She believes in research.

“I would like to know as correctly as I could know what actually did occur, for the person I’m doing the story about,” the actress says. “It makes it more interesting to have it as authentic as possible.”

Yet Harris takes her pursuit of authenticity beyond research. “When she’s sitting in a dressing room, filing down the shoes of her costume so that they look worn, she teaches me detail,” Reilly says. “She will not fake anything. It has to be true. She taught me that word. That’s her favorite word.”

It is a conviction that’s part and parcel of her profound respect for the theater itself--a quality Reilly describes with an anecdote from one of their many outings together. “ ‘At Wit’s End’ was playing at the Coronet, and she used to like to come to see the last half-hour,” he recalls. “One night, we were walking down La Cienega laughing. We arrived at the theater, and she walked into the stage door ahead of me. I saw her make the slightest adjustment that she didn’t even know she’d made. Her body changed because she was entering a place of great reverence.”

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Born in Grosse Pointe, Mich., Harris became interested in the theater--and in performing--when she was a girl. “My mother and father took me to see plays, and it was just something that I grew into gradually,” she recalls. “It was just something that happened to me, that I worked my way into, because I wasn’t a very good student and I was a good mimic.”

As a teenager, she studied at the Perry-Mansfield School of Dance and Theater in Colorado. Due to a wartime shortage of applicants in 1944, Harris was accepted for graduate-level study at the Yale School of Drama, even though she had only just finished high school. She stayed there one year, then decided to continue her training at the Actors Studio in New York.

Harris made her Broadway debut in “It’s a Gift” in 1945. Her first major success came in 1950, with her portrayal of 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams, opposite Ethel Waters, in Harold Clurman’s staging of Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding.” Then 24, Harris spent 1 1/2 years in the role on Broadway. The play was made into a film in 1952, and she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance.

Harris won her first Tony in 1952 for her starring role as Sally Bowles in John Van Druten’s “I Am a Camera.” She also repeated this performance when the play was made into a film in 1955.

Despite her early screen triumphs and those that would follow, Harris began as, and has remained, primarily a woman of the theater. She won her second Tony for her portrayal of St. Joan in Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark,” and her third in 1969 for “Forty Carats.” Harris’ fourth Tony was awarded for her turn as Mary Todd Lincoln in James Prideaux’s “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln,” and she won her landmark fifth Tony in 1977 for “The Belle of Amherst.”

In addition to these outings, Harris has received numerous other Tony nominations and appeared in a wide range of stage works, including another Luce-penned solo, “Lucifer’s Child,” in which she portrayed Dinesen. More recently, she has appeared in national tours of such plays as “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Lettice and Lovage” and “The Gin Game.”

Although she had received training, Harris believes, in retrospect, that a lot of her early work was largely instinctive. “I didn’t understand too many things when I started out,” she says. “It was hit or miss. I certainly think there’s nothing to train an actor better than acting on the stage, not only for your memory, but your whole physical attitude toward the work. The stage is the only place to learn to use your voice.

“Nowadays everything is amplified. But in my day, when I was starting out, you had to learn to make your voice carry. I miss that terribly.”

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During the 1950s and 1960s, Harris was seen with impressive regularity on the Broadway stage. She appeared almost every season and, in addition to the film work, managed to fit in classical work at the respected Stratford, Canada, and New York Shakespeare festivals.

It was during the ‘60s that Harris first became enamored of Dickinson’s writing. At the time, Harris was invited to make a recording of the poet’s poems and letters for Caedmon Records. The project was a success, leading not only to a follow-up album, but also sparking Harris’ passion for the writer. “They asked me to do a second recording, and by that time I was reading her poems and letters myself,” she says. “I began reading her then, and I was hooked.”

In 1965, Harris and Reilly first worked together in a musical called “Skyscraper.” By this time, Harris was so enamored of Dickinson that she had made her passion something of a crusade, doing readings at schools, churches and other venues.

“She did a benefit for an Episcopalian church on an off night on a Monday,” Reilly says. “She came out and read a letter of the young Emily. She leaned on the table like it was a desk and said two words, ‘Dear Abiah,’ and I knew from the first two words that it was a play. If anything belonged in a theater, it was these words. She truly breathed them and knew them.”

And so began what would prove to be a long haul for “The Belle of Amherst.” Reilly conceived the project, tapped Luce to write it, and he set about finding backers. “For eight years nobody wanted it,” Reilly says. “There were no takers anywhere. Nobody wanted Julie Harris spouting poetry. That’s the same thing that happened to Miss Dickinson. If you do Zelda Fitzgerald, there’s fires down the street. And if you do Ruby Dee or Oscar Levant, there’s a party. You inherit an echo of the actual life that you’re honoring.”

Ten years after that first night Reilly heard Harris read, the actor-director was having lunch at Sardi’s when he overheard producers Don Gregory and Mike Merrick discussing upcoming projects. As Reilly tells it in his one-man show, “Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly”--which recently closed a successful run at the Falcon Theatre--they were talking about how they’d like to find a one-woman play to produce. And the rest, as they say, is show-biz history.

“The Belle of Amherst” embarked on a pre-Broadway tour, starting with its premiere in Seattle in 1976. It opened on Broadway in April of the same year. But while the play was well received before New York, the tide turned when it hit the Great White Way. “It was panned by every critic,” Reilly says. “ ‘Take your poems and get lost.’ It’s what Emily got in life too.”

Fortunately for all involved, things turned around. Although the initial New York Times review was negative, a second analysis appeared two weeks later, along with positive notices in national news weeklies. That saved the day at the box office. “Then the line was around the block,” Reilly says.

“There’s a vivaciousness to Emily Dickinson that is inhabited by Julie Harris that runs counter to many people’s expectations of the poet,” says Laguna Playhouse executive director Richard Stein. “It’s a surprising and delightful show in that regard.”

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Producer Gregory, who now lives in Newport Beach, is the one who first approached Harris about doing a tour. Gregory then brought the project to Laguna Playhouse.

“So, after prolonged negotiations, we are producing it here for a regular subscription run, then transferring the production to A Contemporary Theater in Seattle,” says Stein, whose 420-seat theater is celebrating its 80th anniversary this season. “Then, at the end of that run, our tour of it begins. It’s the first time we’ve produced a major tour.”

Harris, on the other hand, has done many tours. Divorced and with one grown son, she has spent a good deal of time on the road. Her most recent stints include the National Actors Theatre production of “The Gin Game,” in which she co-starred with Charles Durning. That production, also directed by Reilly, played Los Angeles in 1998, the last time Harris was seen on a Southern California stage.

When not touring, Harris keeps busy with work in venues large and small, in theater, film, television and radio. This past spring, Harris appeared close to her Cape Cod home, at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, in a production of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.”

Stein had the good fortune to catch that performance. “I saw the original Broadway production, and Julie’s take on it was very different, much more balanced and effective,” he says. “Her deviousness in the role was just thrilling to watch.”

After “The Belle of Amherst,” Harris has other projects in the works, including more solo shows about famous women. “I have a friend, Bruce Kellner, who has written a play about Alice B. Toklas, ‘Staying On Alone,’ ” Harris says. “And I’ve commissioned a writer named Stacy Engels to write a play about Emily Carr, a Canadian painter who died in the ‘40s.”

What keeps her working so much at an age when many would be content to rest on their laurels, particularly if their laurels were as substantial as Harris’? “I’ve never lost my curiosity,” the actress says. “Curiosity has a lot to do with longevity. I’m constantly amazed at living and life and friendship and people. I’m still training, I’m still learning. I just think it’s a continuous process.”

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“The Belle of Amherst,” Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Opens Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. $44-$53. Ends Oct. 8. (949) 497-2787.