Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesJulie Harris, a Broadway legend and award-winning actress of stage and screen, died Saturday at her Massachusetts home of congestive heart failure, per published reports. She was 87.
Harris will be remembered for portraying a wide range of characters, from Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera to Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, during a theater career that spanned over 60 years.
And she sure had the accolades to prove it.
Harris won a record five Tony Awards for best actress in a play. She was honored again with a sixth Tony, a special lifetime achievement award in 2002. The only other star to come close was Angela Lansbury, winning four Tonys in the best actress-musical category and one for best supporting actress in a play.
"I'm still in sort of a place of shock," family friend Francesca James, who appeared in daytime soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live, said.
"She was, really, the greatest influence in my life," said James, who had known Harris for about 50 years.
Harris also dipped into television, starring as Lilimae Clements on the prime-time soap opera Knots Landing. She also took on numerous movie roles, including starring opposite her romantic (and dreamy) costar James Dean in East of Eden.
However, the stage was always the heart of Harris' career. "The theater has been my church," the actress once said. "I don't hesitate to say that I found God in the theater."
Harris' last Broadway appearances were in revivals, playing the domineering mother in a Roundabout Theatre Company production of The Glass Menagerie (1994) and then The Gin Game with Charles Durning for the National Actors Theatre in 1997.
Harris was married three times, to lawyer Jay I. Julian, stage manager Manning Gurian and writer William Erwin Carroll. She had one son, Peter Alston Gurian.
Funeral arrangements have yet to be made.