In Your Harriet

Harriet Harris participated in an early reading of my play Jeffrey, enacting three very different roles. She was so incandescently gifted that I immediately wrote her five more, and I would gladly spend the rest of my life in her service. Harriet is that sublime rarity: a great classical actress who is also, through some lucky genetic frazzle, an inspired clown (think Maggie Smith, Zoe Caldwell, or all the Redgrave women combined). Bred in Fort Worth and honed at Juilliard, she has long been an insider's legend; now, thanks to film roles in Todd Haynes's Dottie Gets Spanked, Robert Redford's Quiz Show, and, bless her, in my own script for Addams Family Values, she will begin world conquest. Watching her in rehearsal and onstage is a privilege; she is dazzlingly inventive, Medea one moment and Bert Lahr the next. I once jokingly suggested that, in addition to her gallery of parts in Jeffrey, she might also hand-crank the show's turntable. She glanced up, with a rather serious gleam in her eye. "Well," she said, "with the right wig...

PAUL RUDNICK