She died at home in Manhattan after a terminal cancer diagnosis, and her daughter said the death was medically assisted.
Barbara Barrie, the actress who was Oscar-nominated for Breaking Away and won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for One Potato, Two Potato, died on Wednesday, 28 October, at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.
Her daughter, Jane Harnick, confirmed the death to The New York Times. She said Barrie had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and that the death was medically assisted.
Barrie's representative, speaking on behalf of the Harnick family, said in a statement to E! News: “I can confirm that her passing was medically assisted in accordance with the New York State Medical Aid in Dying law, of which she was a proponent and advocate.”
Barrie's first Broadway appearance was in The Wooden Dish, in 1955. In 1970 she originated the role of Sarah in the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Company and was nominated for a Tony Award for it. The last part she played on Broadway came in 2017, in Joshua Harmon's Significant Other.
In 1964 she starred in One Potato, Two Potato, directed by Larry Peerce, as a divorced woman who marries an African-American office worker, played by Bernie Hamilton, and in doing so risks losing custody of her child.
Her best-known film role came in Breaking Away (1979), as the mother of a small-town young man, played by Dennis Christopher, who dreams of becoming a competitive bicycle racer. Barrie was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar and lost to Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer.
Barrie had asked for a scene with her on-screen son. "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."
On television she played the wife of the captain of a Greenwich Village police station, played by Hal Linden, on the ABC sitcom Barney Miller, which ran from 1975 to 1982. She was also Nana, the grandmother of Brooke Shields' character, on the NBC sitcom Suddenly Susan, from 1996 to 2000.
Barrie told The New York Times in 2017 what she thought of awards:
"Your life is more important than your work."
Barrie received a rectal cancer diagnosis in the 1990s. She wrote two books about her illness, Second Act (1997) and Don't Die of Embarrassment (1999), in an effort to reduce the stigma. In 2014 she announced that she had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Her union with Jay Harnick lasted from 1964 until he died in 2007. She is survived by her daughter, Jane Harnick, her son, Aaron Harnick, a Broadway producer, and three grandchildren.
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