Barbara Barrie, Actress in ‘Breaking Away,’ ‘Company’ and ‘Barney Miller,’ Dies at 95

Barbara Barrie, the sprightly actress who starred in the heart-wrenching interracial drama One Potato, Two Potato and earned an Oscar nomination for playing the supportive mom in Breaking Away, died Wednesday. She was 95.

Barrie died at her home in Manhattan, The New York Times reported. Her daughter, Jane Harnick, told the newspaper that she had terminal cancer and that her death was medically assisted.

Barrie also portrayed the dieting foodie Sarah, the wife of a man with a drinking problem (Charles Kimbrough), in the original 1970-72 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and she received one of the landmark musical’s then record-setting 14 Tony nominations.

A veteran of the stage, she also appeared in the first Broadway runs of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue and California Suite, in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy and, more recently, as a Jewish bubbe in 2017 in Joshua Harmon’s Significant Other.

Fans of Barney Miller know Barrie for playing the wife of the captain of a Greenwich Village police station (Hal Linden) on the 1975-82 ABC sitcom, and she had another recurring role, as the grandmother and confidant of Brooke Shields’ character, on the 1996-2000 NBC magazine-set comedy Suddenly Susan.

For One Potato, Two Potato (1964), directed by Larry Peerce, Barrie was named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of a white woman with a young daughter who, after being abandoned by her loser husband (Richard Mulligan), falls in love and marries an African-American office worker (Bernie Hamilton).

The New York Times wrote that Barrie “justifies the [Cannes] prize with a portrayal that is perceptively naturalistic. She is timid, worried and, finally, feminine in the extreme as a woman fighting against impossible odds in defense of her love and family.”

Released three years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the poignant drama, filmed in black and white on location in Painesville, Ohio, is believed to be the first U.S. movie to portray such an interracial relationship.

Also set in the Midwest — in Bloomington, Indiana — the inspiring, coming-of-age tale Breaking Away (1979) saw Barrie receive a supporting actress Oscar nom for playing the reassuring mother of a kid (Dennis Christopher) obsessed with Italian bicycle racing.

After director Peter Yates told her she had the part, she read a revised script and noticed that “it was about a boy who is at odds with his father but who is a chip off the block of his mother. Yet you never see a scene between him and his mother,” she recalled in a 2017 interview.

Barrie asked for some kind of “connecting scene” to be added, and that turned out to be the one in which she shows her passport to her son and tells him to follow his dreams. “That scene would not have been in the picture if I hadn’t asked for it,” she said. “I can’t believe the chutzpah I had in asking for it.”

Barrie lost out to Meryl Streep of Kramer vs. Kramer at the Oscars. She returned as Evelyn Stoller in a 1980-81 ABC adaptation of Breaking Away that starred Shaun Cassidy, but that lasted just eight episodes. She did, however, earn an Emmy nom for that performance as well.

Barbara Ann Berman was born in Chicago on May 23, 1931. She and her family moved to Texas when she was 9, and she graduated from Corpus Christi Senior High School and then the University of Texas at Austin, where her classmates included Rip Torn, Jayne Mansfield and Liz Smith.

She came to New York by train to accompany her boyfriend, who was an actor, and worked as a typist to pay the rent. In 1955, she starred as a shop girl on an installment of ABC’s Ponds Theatre, made her Broadway debut in The Wooden Dish and landed a walk-on part in Giant (1956), where she can be seen at Mercedes McCambridge’s funeral reception.

A recommendation from none other than Katharine Hepburn got her into John Houseman’s American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, and she worked for two seasons alongside the likes of Fritz Weaver, Will Geer, Nancy Marchand and Sada Thompson. She also studied with Uta Hagen.

In the early 1960s, Barrie starred as Annie Sullivan (the role originated by Anne Bancroft) in a State Department tour of The Miracle Worker that played throughout Europe.

To prepare for her part as a catatonic patient at the mercy of a nasty nurse played by Joan Crawford in The Caretakers (1963), Barrie signed herself into a mental hospital in California, then frantically needed the director of the film, Hall Bartlett, to get her out.

She was starring in a production of Taming of the Shrew in Flint, Michigan, when she was spotted by a producer and offered the role of Julie in One Potato. “It was an odd, eerie day when that phone call came to Flint,” she said in 1964 interview with the Times. “It was the very same day with police dogs and fire hoses in Alabama. I’m not a crusader, but it was a spooky coincidence.”

Her role in Company was the only non-singing one among the principal players, but she was featured in the 1970 D.A. Pennebaker documentary on the making of the show’s fabled cast album.

Known for her blond, boyish bob, she played Goldie Hawn’s mom in Private Benjamin (1980) and Edie Falco’s mother in Judy Berlin (1999), getting an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the latter.

She also was Diana Rigg’s next-door neighbor on a short-lived sitcom in 1973-74; tried to woo Gavin MacLeod on a memorable 1974 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show; portrayed Mamie Eisenhower on the 1979 miniseries Backstairs at the White House; and earned two more Emmy noms for guest-starring stints on Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU in 1992 and 2003.

Her TV résumé also included turns on Naked City, The Untouchables, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Fugitive, The Twilight Zone (in the 1963 episode “Miniature” with Robert Duvall) and Enlightened.

She wrote the novels Lone Star — about an Orthodox Jewish family assimilating in Texas — and Adam Zigzag as well as two books about overcoming rectal cancer and a colostomy. In an effort to help others, she announced in 2014 that she had been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

In 2008, Barrie donated photographs, programs, a scrapbook and other items from her career to the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library.

She was married to Jay Harnick from 1964 until his death in 2007. They met at an audition and were friends for 12 years before he proposed.

He was the founder and longtime artistic director of TheatreworksUSA, the nation’s largest touring children’s theater company — which was instrumental to the careers of F. Murray Abraham and Henry Winkler — and the brother of Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.

In addition to her daughter, survivors include her son, Aaron, a Broadway producer.