Julie Harris

Julie Harris belonged to the theatre first and to film second, and she never pretended otherwise. She won five Tony Awards for Best Lead Actress in a Play, a record for the category, and added three Primetime Emmys and a Grammy for spoken-word recording, along with an Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA nomination. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979, given the National Medal of Arts in 1994, a Special Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2002 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2005.

Her gift was a fragility that never asks for sympathy. In East of Eden she plays Abra opposite James Dean and does the almost impossible job of being the sane person in a film organised entirely around a volatile one; the scenes work because she listens rather than reacts. Eight years later The Haunting gave her Eleanor Lance, and it is the finest thing she did on screen: a woman so starved of attention that a malevolent house feels to her like being wanted, played from the inside, largely in voice-over, without a single moment of camp.

She never settled into one lane. She is Alison Langdon opposite Marlon Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye, a nightclub singer in the detective picture Harper, Betsie ten Boom in the wartime drama The Hiding Place, and a passenger in Voyage of the Damned. Television gave her Lilimae Clements on Knots Landing, and Ken Burns used her as the voice of the diarist Mary Chesnut in The Civil War, which is where a great many Americans have heard her without knowing whose voice it was. She died in 2013.