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The new girl in Miss Hewitt's Classes was small and scrawny, with lank orange hair that hung to her shoulders and a worried little button mouth that made her look like a newborn mouse. She stood stiffly in a corner like a broom somebody had left there, while the other girls smiled and pulled their sweaters down and wondered what the awkward little newcomer was doing in the drama class. When the teacher came in, she asked each girl in turn to say why she wanted to act. "Well, it's better than ballet," one saucy subdeb said, and another replied: "Mother thinks it will give me poise." When the question was put to the girl in the corner, she lifted her quiet grey eyes to the teacher's face and said simply: "It's my life."
The teacher gasped -and many others since that day have gasped at Julie Harris. In the last dozen years, the girl with the plain little face and childlike limbs has laid her life upon the stage like a candle upon an altar, and the still, strong flame of her talent shines through the nervous wattage of Broadway with a pure and steady light. In a comparatively short career -until last week she had played only three major parts on Broadway -Julie Harris has established herself as, at the very least, the best young actress in America. A European director calls her "one of the few great actresses of the age." The critics, forgetting their normal caution, have noted her "enormous range," her "incomparable sensibility," her "genius." Her fellow actors agree. Helen Hayes has solemnly passed on to her the handkerchief that Sarah Bernhardt gave to Julia Marlowe -sure symbol of her succession as first lady of the American theater. Ethel Barrymore, after Julie's success in Member of the Wedding and I Am a Camera, concluded: "That girl can do anything."
Giant Abstraction. Julie would be the last to agree with the Barrymore boast -but the dare was exciting. Last week on Broadway she took it. She opened as Joan of Arc in Lillian Hellman's adaptation of The Lark from the French of Jean Anouilh. Her previous roles, no matter how complex, had kept within the limits of "colloquial drama." She had played people of life size in a theater of the norm, and she had only to cut herself to make her characters bleed. Joan, however, was not merely a human being, into whose feelings an actress can properly project her own. She was also a historic idea, a giant abstraction. To bring her alive would require no little of that art divine that made the statue of Galatea move. Julie knew that she was about to challenge "greatness" as that word was made woman in Bernhardt and Duse and Terry -to challenge it, moreover, as an actress still on the green side of 30.