Barbara Barrie, an elfin character actress who won or was nominated for numerous awards, most often for playing wives and mothers — but never a character who would be mistaken for anyone’s mere appendage — died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.
Her daughter, Jane Harnick, said the death was medically assisted. Ms. Barrie had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She announced in 2014 that she had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative disease.
To movie fans, she was probably best known as an Indiana teenager’s supportive mother with dreams (and a cherished passport) of her own in “Breaking Away” (1979). That role earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
Years earlier, in a rare starring role, she had been named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964 for “One Potato, Two Potato,” a low-budget drama about an interracial marriage in midcentury America. (Anne Bancroft shared the award, for “The Pumpkin Eater.”)
Sitcom viewers knew her as the wife of Hal Linden’s police captain on “Barney Miller” (although she was rarely seen after the first season) and Brooke Shields’s grandmother on “Suddenly Susan.” She also appeared in scores of network and cable movies, and on series including “Route 66” in the 1960s to “Nurse Jackie” and “Enlightened” a half-century later. She earned Emmy nominations for appearances on “Law & Order,” its spinoff “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” and “Breaking Away,” a short-lived series based on the film.
On Broadway, she was first and foremost the original Sarah — the petite wife who is learning karate: “Come at me!” — in Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical “Company” (1970). The show brought her a Tony nomination for best featured actress in a musical.
Barbara Ann Berman was born in Chicago on May 23, 1931, the second child and only daughter of Louis Berman, an insurance salesman, and Frances (Boruszak) Berman.
The family moved to Texas when Barbara was 9. She grew up in Corpus Christi and graduated in 1952 from the University of Texas, where she was a drama major.
When she moved to New York in the early 1950s, though, it was for love, not for her career. The relationship didn’t work out, but she stayed in the city and began studying, auditioning and working at odd jobs. Her first television roles were on Golden Age series, including “Robert Montgomery Presents.”
From the start, Ms. Barrie had her eye on theater, beginning with summer productions in Corning, N.Y. She made her Broadway debut in “The Wooden Dish,” a short-lived 1955 comedy; her last Broadway appearance was 62 years later in another comedy, “Significant Other,” as the hero’s grandmother, who is supportive and perky even when she talks about suicide. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter saluted her “unsentimental tenderness” in that role. (Coincidentally, both productions were at the Booth Theater on 45th Street.)
In between, her Broadway appearances included a starring role in 1976 opposite Jack Weston in Neil Simon’s hotel-room comedy “California Suite.” Her Off Broadway career was considerably broader. She was Elizabeth Proctor in an acclaimed production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” in 1958. She also spent a season (1958-59) at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., when John Houseman was its artistic director, playing Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Bianca in “The Taming of the Shrew.”
Back in the city, she reprised her role as Bianca at the Delacorte Theater in what is now known as Shakespeare in the Park. Also at the Delacorte, she was Viola in “Twelfth Night” (1969), which she once called her favorite role, and Helena in “All’s Well That Ends Well” (1966).
For her portrayal of a dissatisfied wife in Jay Broad’s “The Killdeer” (1974) at the Public Theater, she won both the Drama Desk Award and the Obie. Later she was Tasha Blumberg, the aerobics-addicted Jewish mother, in Wendy Wasserstein’s “Isn’t It Romantic” (1984); a West Coast visitor with strong opinions in Anne Meara’s “After-Play” (1995); and the Norwegian American daughter and narrator in the Transport Group’s 2014 production of “I Remember Mama.”
Ms. Barrie was the author of four books, all published in the 1990s. “Adam Zigzag” and “Lone Star” were novels for young readers; “Second Act” and “Don’t Die of Embarrassment” were nonfiction works about life after cancer and her colostomy.
In 1964, she married Jay Harnick, who became the founder and artistic director of TheaterWorksUSA, and they had two children. Mr. Harnick, the brother of the lyricist Sheldon Harnick, died in 2007.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her son, Aaron Harnick, and three granddaughters.
Movies were never a big part of her career plan, but she made her share. While visiting her family in Texas, she was recruited to make a brief appearance in a party scene in George Stevens’s “Giant” (1956), which was filming there. Her first credited film role was as a mental patient in “The Caretakers” (1963).
Sometimes, in fact, years went by between films, after which she would do three or so in rapid succession. “Breaking Away” came right after “The Bell Jar” (1979) and right before “Private Benjamin” (1980), in which she played Goldie Hawn’s stylish mother. Her character was so horrified that her pampered daughter had joined the Army that she saved face by telling friends that Ms. Hawn’s Judy Benjamin was in a “mental home.”
Ms. Barrie said she had fallen in love with filmmaking early on, while shooting “One Potato, Two Potato.” “I thought — boy, this is exciting! This is what I want,” she told The Times eagerly in 1964. “It is, too.”
Then, perhaps fearing she’d sounded too career-oriented, she “smiled puckishly,” according to the reporter, and added: “That — and to live a healthy life and be a good woman, and wife.”
Ama Sarpomaa and Robin Pogrebin contributed reporting.
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