Much more than ‘just some old lady’

SAN DIEGO -- “I had an anxiety dream the other night,” says actress Rosemary Harris, just before the first preview of “Oscar and the Pink Lady.” “I was in the middle of a performance and then all the characters in the play suddenly began coming out from the wings, handing me pieces of paper. And I said to them, ‘Sorry, but I don’t think you belong here. You know, this isn’t helpful.’ But they kept coming nonetheless.”

She laughs and then adds, “Ah, well, if I do forget lines, I just hope people will think, well, it’s just some old lady. . . .”

Just some old lady indeed. At 80, the luminous Harris, a Tony and Emmy award winner and Oscar nominee, is venturing into one of the most challenging and emotionally demanding roles of her long and varied career on both sides of the Atlantic. At a point when most actors her age are coasting -- especially if they’ve managed to snag a featured role in a popular film franchise (like her Aunt May Parker in “Spider-Man”) -- Harris is alone onstage for 90 minutes playing “Granny Pink,” a volunteer in a children’s cancer ward who strikes up an unusual friendship with 10-year-old Oscar, one of the hospital’s feistier patients.

In fact, Harris is called on to play a pageant of characters who are conjured up in the letters that Oscar writes to God to cope with his perilous circumstances. They include the boy’s precocious reactions to his doctor, his shell-shocked parents, his friends in the ward, and especially to the astringent Granny, who dispels his blues with her colorful (fictional) past as a female wrestler vanquishing nemeses like The Butcher From Bognor and Thunder Thighs.

“I found it utterly delightful, a really extraordinary piece of theater,” says Harris, imposingly erect on a velvet settee in the Old Globe Theatre’s plush VIP room, which accentuates her hair pulled back in a bun, porcelain skin and piercing blue eyes. “I think audiences will find it quite funny, surprisingly so. And I hope they come away with more of an appreciation for living. I know I have just by learning it. This young boy lays it on the line in a very simple and direct manner.”

Nearby is the show’s British director, Frank Dunlop, Harris’ longtime friend and collaborator, who edited the play from the slim novella by the Belgian writer Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (“Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran”). Dunlop says he first approached Harris several years ago with an English translation that had not been to her liking. Using a new translation by Stephane Laporte, Dunlop further developed the piece with Angela Lansbury, who performed the play in a benefit reading last March at the Geffen Playhouse. When Lansbury chose not to continue, the director turned to Harris, whom he had directed in a number of productions, mainly classics, in New York and London.

“Rosemary is not afraid to go too far and risk failure. She has an astonishing ability to be on the knife edge all the time,” Dunlop says. “Within seconds, she can move an audience from laughter to tears. She can morph from a senior citizen to a 10-year-old boy. And although it’s very serious subject matter -- a kid with inoperable cancer -- Rosemary makes this show about optimism rather than pessimism, about the joys of life rather than its sorrows, without ever dipping into sentimentality.”

Indeed, formidable women are something of a Harris specialty, among them her 1966 Tony-winning Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Lion in Winter,” her Emmy turn as George Sand in the 1974 miniseries “Notorious Woman,” her 1979 Golden Globe for a Jewish doctor’s wife in “The Holocaust” and her Oscar-nominated performance as T.S. Eliot’s mother-in-law in 1994’s “Tom and Viv.”

Harris, however, is just as adept in playing damaged women as she proved as Blanche in a 1973 revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Whereas Blanche has no one to turn to in her utter despair -- “it’s the loneliest part in the world” -- Granny Pink, and Oscar for that matter, transcend their troubles through their belief in God. “Whoever anybody’s definition of God may be, there is that equation in the play,” Harris says. “It’s not about losing but about winning, about joy not despair or degradation.”

Wishing to keep her own feelings about God private (“they do change from time to time”), Harris notes that she had a “Granny Pink” in her life. After the sudden death of her mother when Harris was 14, she and her two sisters were raised by her grandmother and her father, a British air force officer. “It was Gram and her sister, who nurtured and cherished us, always supported us in whatever we wanted to do,” recalls Harris, who spent her earliest years in India, where her father had been stationed, then attended Anglo-Catholic convent schools in England. The stage came as an afterthought to Harris, her ambitions directed toward nursing and later physiotherapy.

“My sister was at RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art], and so I would cue her at home in reading the plays. But I thought of her friends as flighty and inconsequential,” Harris says with a laugh. “I was a much more serious-minded little girl, and so I was very keen on nursing.” Though she went to Oxford to practice (“I thought I might meet some handsome Oxford student, never realizing that town and gown never mixed”), she feared she would end up in the gulag of administrative nursing. Moving into physiotherapy demanded financial resources she didn’t have. “So my sister said, ‘Why don’t you act? You’re always acting at home.’ ”

Good advice, as it turned out. After a stint at RADA and experience in English repertory, Harris eventually came to the U.S. for a short-lived Broadway debut in Moss Hart’s 1952 “Climate of Eden,” followed by a Hollywood film debut in 1954’s “Beau Brummel” with Stewart Granger and Elizabeth Taylor.

In the 1950s, she met and married the American director-actor Ellis Rabb. Together the couple established the prestigious American rep company APA that lasted beyond the marriage, which ended in 1967. Harris then married the writer John Ehle and moved with him to Winston-Salem, N.C., which she still calls home. Their daughter is the Tony-winning actress Jennifer Ehle (“The Real Thing,” “The Coast of Utopia”).

If Harris is in an especially ruminative mood as she looks back on her life and career, it is in no small measure to the role that she finds herself playing -- and also because, it must be noted, she is turning 80 on this very day. The message of “Oscar and the Pink Lady” feels particularly resonant to her. “Life is a gift,” she says softly. “As this play says, at first you think it belongs to you, that you’ll have life everlasting. Then you think it stinks. It’s too short and you almost want to throw it away. Then you realize maybe life isn’t a gift after all -- it’s just a loan. And you have to earn it in some way, you have to be worthy of deserving it.”

Harris pauses for a while and then adds with a laugh, “I love that line in the play, ‘Any old moron can enjoy life when he’s 10 or 20. But when you’re a hundred, when you can’t move anymore, you need to use your intelligence.’ ”

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‘Oscar and the Pink Lady’

Where: Old Globe, Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Balboa Park, San Diego

When: 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays,

2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Nov. 4

Price: $19 to $59

Contact: (619) 234-5689