Barbara Densmoor Harris (July 25, 1935 – August 21, 2018) was an American Tony Award-winning Broadway stage star and Academy Award-nominated motion picture actress.

Produced by Max Liebman (among others) and directed by Paul Sills, the production presented Harris in such sketches as Caesar's Wife, First Affair, Museum Piece, and The Bergman Film.

Harris gave another well-received performance in The Apple Tree, another Broadway musical created for her, this time by the team of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick.

The show, in which Harris co-starred with Alan Alda and Larry Blyden and was directed by Mike Nichols, opened at the Shubert Theater on October 5, 1966 and closed on November 25, 1967.

Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Post wrote "[t]here are many high triumphs of the imagination in the vastly original musical comedy ... [b]ut it is Miss Harris who provides it with the extra touch of magic."

"[6] After reading scripts for David Merrick, Harris directed a Broadway production of The Penny Wars by Elliott Baker in 1969 starring Kim Hunter, George Voskovec, and Kristoffer Tabori.

She stopped appearing on stage after The Apple Tree, except for the off-Broadway first American production of Brecht and Weill's Mahagonny in 1970, in which she played the role of Jenny, originally created by Lotte Lenya.

She co-starred opposite Jason Robards Jr., who played the freewheeling, eternally optimistic guardian of his teenage nephew, the custody of whom is threatened by authorities' dim view of his bohemian lifestyle.

Reviewing the latter film for The New York Times on February 16, 1967, critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "Barbara Harris from the original play cast is as wacky as she was on the stage — casual and direct and totally blasé about the boisterous business of sex.

In Neil Simon's Plaza Suite (1971) with Walter Matthau, the British entertainment magazine Time Out called the "delightful" Harris' gifts "wasted".

She earned an Oscar nomination for the 1971 film (which co-starred Dustin Hoffman) Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, about a rich, successful, womanizing pop songwriter suffering a debilitating but oddly liberating mental crisis.

Accounts of the film's chaotic and inspired production, particularly in Jan Stuart's book The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece, indicate a clash between actress and director.

She received praise from critics as well as a Golden Globe nomination for the film, which was based on the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning, and which marked a reunion of Hitchcock with Ernest Lehman, who had created the original screenplay for North by Northwest.

She co-starred in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) with one of her former Broadway leading men, Alan Alda (who also wrote the screenplay), a tale of a liberal Washington Senator caught in an affair with a younger woman, played by Meryl Streep.

In 1981, she starred in Second-Hand Hearts for esteemed director Hal Ashby as "Dinette Dusty", a recently widowed waitress and would-be singer who marries a boozy carwash worker named "Loyal", played by Robert Blake, to get back her children from their paternal grandparents.

The film, based on a highly sought-after "road movie" screenplay by Charles Eastman, was a critical and box office disaster that tarnished the careers of all concerned.

Critic Vincent Canby in his negative The New York Times review on May 8, 1981 opined, "[t]he film's one bright spot is Barbara Harris, who plays Dinette as sincerely as possible under awful conditions.