"The Member of the Wedding" is Harris's signature part, and the film of it would be enough to secure her place in the pantheon of American actors, but she will always be best known as Abra, the girl that James Dean loves in "East of Eden" (1955). That is Dean's movie, but Harris is right there with him, helping him, listening to him, feeling a kinship to him as one emotional freak to another. She seems to get a genuine delight from just looking at his extravagant physical contortions, and there's nothing at all conventional about her reaction to him. Harris is the first person to really get James Dean on screen, and she does it right in front of us with all of her feelings firing at once at him, her empathy, her flirtatiousness, her humor, and her stubbornness.

After scaling the heights of Frankie's fierce and verbose solitude, Harris seems to find some relief in focusing her attention on another person who happens to be absurdly beautiful and also absurdly needy and nasty and helpless. Think of her reclining out in the grass and listening to Dean's Cal, toying with a blade of grass in her mouth, or up on the Ferris wheel with him, when she shyly admits her lack of connection to his brother Aron (Richard Davalos), her official boyfriend.

Harris proved that she could be funny as Sally Bowles in "I Am a Camera" (1955), a film of her stage success, which won her the first of five competitive lead actress Tony awards. She gleefully camps up her own mannerisms in that movie and highlights the fun in Sally's exultant phoniness, so that even being stuck with Laurence Harvey as her leading man doesn't impede her much. All in all, "The Member of the Wedding," "East of Eden" and "I Am a Camera" made for an extremely distinguished start to what might have been a major film career, but Harris focused instead on the theater and on live TV, appearing as Joan of Arc and Queen Victoria and in lots of vehicles that were not exactly worthy of her in between stints as Nora in "A Doll's House" and Ophelia in "Hamlet." She started to get typecast as spinsters and neurotics, like the fearful Eleanor in "The Haunting" (1963), and her last worthwhile film role was in another McCullers adaptation, "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1967), where she played an invalid who has cut off her nipples with a pair of garden shears.

From about 1970 on, Harris's film and TV career strangely deteriorated. She was treated and cast, it seemed, as just another working actress, as if everyone had forgotten that she was one of our special performing artists, one of our most vivid interpreters of emotional extremes. She played surprisingly little Tennessee Williams, even though she seemed made for parts like Alma in "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" or Hannah in "The Night of the Iguana." On stage, she acted in acclaimed one-woman shows as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë and Isak Dinesen, and what amounted to a one-woman show as Mary Todd Lincoln.

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