Actress Barbara Barrie, known for Breaking Away and One Potato Two Potato, dies at 95

Barbara Barrie died Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95 years old.

Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told The New York Times that her mother had terminal cancer. The death was medically assisted.

Barrie’s career spanned seven decades of theater, film, and television. She won the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964. That honor came for her role in One Potato, Two Potato. The film is considered the first U.S. movie to depict an interracial relationship.

In that production, Barrie played a white woman who marries an African American office worker. The film was directed by Larry Peerce and filmed in black and white in Painesville, Ohio. It was released three years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Barrie was in Flint, Michigan, when she received the call for the part. She recalled the coincidence of the date with the civil rights protests in Alabama.

She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1980. The role was the mother in Breaking Away. The film is set in Bloomington, Indiana, and follows a young man obsessed with Italian bicycle racing. Barrie lost the Oscar to Meryl Streep for Kramer vs. Kramer. She said she asked the director for a connecting scene between the mother and son because the script lacked one. That request resulted in the scene where she shows her passport to her son.

Barrie also appeared in the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. She played Sarah, the wife of a man with a drinking problem. The musical received 14 Tony nominations during its run. She later starred in Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue and California Suite. She also performed in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy and Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other in 2017.

Television audiences recognized her as the wife of the police captain on Barney Miller. The ABC sitcom aired from 1975 to 1982. She also had a recurring role on Suddenly Susan from 1996 to 2000. She received Emmy nominations for guest appearances on Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

Barbara Ann Berman was born in Chicago on May 23, 1931. Her family moved to Texas when she was nine. She attended the University of Texas at Austin. She moved to New York in the 1950s to follow an actor boyfriend and worked as a typist to pay rent. Katharine Hepburn recommended her for the American Shakespeare Theatre in Connecticut.

She married Jay Harnick in 1964. They met at an audition and were friends for 12 years before he proposed. Harnick was the founder and artistic director of TheatreworksUSA. He died in 2007. Barrie is survived by her son, Aaron, and three grandchildren. She donated her career archives to the New York Public Library in 2008.