Barbara's World
Barbara Barrie is a strange and comforting angel to me. Her face exudes light somehow, no matter what character she's playing, and she has played a lot of them in movies and TV for the last half century. (She's still at it, at age 90, God bless her.) You automatically and gratefully recognize her as soon as you spot her: Barney Miller's wife, Michael Steadman's mom, the ironic but loving moms in Breaking Away and Private Benjamin -- even Lou Grant 's girlfriend in a two-part episode. The list goes on. She occupies a beautiful space in my head, a familiar sleepy-eyed queen doing her son's laundry and smiling ironically at having to do these stupid wonderful chores. Her resume is so exhaustive in fact that I missed her first starring role as a divorcee who marries a black man and loses the custody of her daughter. The movie's title is One Potato, Two Potato , and it offers a bleak, spare, black-and-white vision of 1964 race re...